Vention Opens Montreal Physical AI Lab for Industrial Robotics
aiinsider ·
Vention, an industrial automation company, has opened a physical AI research lab in Montreal aimed at turning advances in robotic manipulation into reliable, scalable systems for manufacturing. The lab is led by Jimmy Li, Vention's director of physical AI, with Cohere chief AI officer Joelle Pineau serving as an external technical adviser. Instead of developing lab-driven robotics models, Vention intends to use data, production problems and customer feedback from operating factories to steer research and to test whether new systems meet real-world requirements for reliability, cost and changing production conditions. Its research spans robotics control, motion planning, computer vision, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, and industrial data and post-training. Among the lab's first products is GRIIP, a modular physical AI software pipeline launched in February that breaks robotic manipulation into scene digitization, object segmentation, pose estimation, grasp selection and motion planning, using foundation models from companies such as NVIDIA alongside Vention's proprietary models, with a public software development kit planned. The Montreal team currently has eight members and is expanding, with more than 16 positions open in robotics control, simulation and physical AI research, and Vention says the lab has already produced intellectual property. Vention notes that physical AI is its fastest-growing segment, with related revenue up 400% over the past year, and that its automation technology is used by thousands of manufacturers globally, including 90 of the Fortune 500. The company is also working with industrial and electronics manufacturers on more complex automation projects, including an unnamed large automotive manufacturer testing robots for less-structured final-assembly tasks.
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