Vention and its companions have invested in area and tools for its new bodily AI lab. Supply: Vention
To generate high-quality information for coaching the AI fashions that function next-generation robots, you want scale. Vention Inc. immediately opened its Bodily AI Lab in Montreal. The corporate stated the brand new laboratory focuses on robotic manipulation in manufacturing.
“Any bodily AI basis mannequin is data-hungry,” Etienne Lacroix, founder and CEO of Vention, advised The Robotic Report. “We transfer a number of hundred robotic cells a yr, and so they all acquire high-quality industrial manipulation information. It was a large asset that was not correctly leveraged till now.”
Vention stated its expertise stack contains {hardware}, software program, and bodily AI. The Montreal-based firm claimed that it allows companies to design, program, and deploy turnkey or customized automation in days. It has deployed greater than 28,000 machines worldwide and a neighborhood of greater than 6,000 factories.
Vention addresses manufacturing challenges
With its expertise deployed throughout producers globally, together with 90 of the Fortune 500, Vention stated its scale provides researchers direct entry to actual environments and a steady stream of information to post-train bodily AI fashions.
“Bodily AI will essentially develop what producers can automate, however the problem is now not merely proving {that a} robotic can carry out a process in a lab,” acknowledged Lacroix. “The actual alternative is making these capabilities dependable, economical, and deployable throughout hundreds of factories. By combining Canada’s world-class AI ecosystem with Vention’s deep robotics experience, industrial information, and full-stack automation platform, we now have a singular basis to shut that hole.”
Income associated to bodily AI has elevated by 400% over the previous yr, reported Vention. The corporate’s mandate is to allow scalable deployment by validating new AI capabilities towards the reliability, price, and variability necessities of actual manufacturing traces.
“We find out about Skild, Generalist, and Bodily Intelligence — there are various fashions and insurance policies,” Lacroix noticed. “The bottom mannequin just isn’t the issue; some fashions are higher for sure duties. We are able to add worth and form the analysis agenda with environment friendly studying, information assortment, and post-training capabilities.”
Editor’s word:Â Bodily AI is among the many session subject tracks at RoboBusiness 2026, which might be on Oct. 20 and 21 in Santa Clara, Calif. Register now to attend.
Register now and assist us rejoice 20 years of RoboBusiness!Bodily AI Lab takes analysis to the manufacturing unit flooring
Vention stated its new lab contains industrial information assortment, robotics management, movement planning, classical laptop imaginative and prescient, imaginative and prescient basis fashions, studying from demonstration, and reinforcement studying. It focuses on complicated and unstructured manufacturing duties.
The corporate famous that whereas mannequin improvement is formed by analysis and benchmarks, it additionally depends on trade suggestions and day-to-day deployment conversations.
“What makes this lab totally different is the loop we’ve constructed: tutorial analysis feeding straight into dwell manufacturing issues, and manufacturing suggestions feeding again into the analysis,” stated Dr. Jimmy Li, director of bodily AI at Vention. “Our purchasers aren’t ready for a completed product to check; they’re within the room whereas we construct it. That’s distinctive on this discipline, and it’s what lets us transfer sooner from a analysis end result to one thing that truly runs on a manufacturing unit flooring.”
Li, head of Vention’s Bodily AI Lab, is a robotics and machine studying researcher from McGill College who has greater than a decade of expertise with peer-reviewed analysis in laptop imaginative and prescient, robotic notion, autonomous methods, and AI-powered robotic manipulation. Over the previous two years, he has led Vention’s bodily AI technique and its collaboration with NVIDIA, translating advances in AI analysis into industrial robotic purposes.
Jimmy Li, director of the brand new Bodily AI Lab in Montreal. Supply: Vention
Innovation beneath means for industrial purposes
Vention stated its new lab has already generated new mental property and plans to proceed to take action. It launched GRIIP (Generalized Robotic Industrial Intelligence Pipeline) in February 2026. The modular bodily AI pipeline spans scene digitalization, object segmentation, pose estimation, grasp choice, and collision-free movement planning.
GRIIP makes use of basis fashions from expertise leaders equivalent to NVIDIA in addition to Vention’s proprietary fashions. The corporate plans to launch a public GRIIP Software program Growth Package (SDK).
“We’ll put GRIIP in open supply and present it alongside our different AI-defined automation at IMTS,” stated Lacroix. Vention plans to introduce bodily AI and agentic AI capabilities unified in a single platform.
The corporate can also be working with international industrial and electronics producers, together with a big automotive OEM on high-complexity, unstructured robotic duties in remaining meeting.
“We’ve all the time been in utilized use circumstances, studying from demonstrations and information assortment, utilizing tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in R&D, and fine-fine tuning fashions for industrial automation,” stated Lacroix. “Kitting is certainly one of our prime utilized analysis use circumstances, which is horizontal — it’s in automotive, in aerospace, and in shopper.”
“Electronics contract producers have all these items of {hardware} coming from varied distributors and varied packaging, They should be opened and reassembled right into a package that may go at a particular station on the meeting line,” he defined. “In the event you’re a automotive producer, it may very well be headlamps with a harness, a mounting bracket, and a screw, and so they should be ready so Place 7 on the road has the correct package for the correct automotive. Kitting was a use case the place these new class of insurance policies are related.”
Exterior advisor brings connections to bodily AI neighborhood
As well as, Vention named Dr. Joelle Pineau, chief AI officer at Cohere, as exterior technical advisor for the Bodily AI Lab. She is going to contribute to mannequin structure selections, analysis prioritization, and connections into the broader AI neighborhood.
“Dr. Pineau was a former VP of analysis at Meta, and he or she did her Ph.D. at CMU,” stated Lacroix. “She managed the groups that developed the SAM 2 mannequin for segmentation.”
As basis fashions mature, Vention stated it expects the complexity and prices of deploying robots to drop, widening the vary of producers that may put them to work.
The publish Vention opens Bodily AI Lab for manufacturing in Montreal appeared first on The Robotic Report.
