Vention, a digital-first industrial automation platform, has opened its bodily AI lab in Montreal. The lab is led by Dr Jimmy Li, Vention’s director of bodily AI, and suggested by Dr Joelle Pineau, chief AI officer at Cohere, and focuses on robotic manipulation for manufacturing, together with industrial items, electronics, and automotive manufacturing.
The lab’s analysis agenda combines industrial information assortment, robotics management, movement planning, classical laptop imaginative and prescient, imaginative and prescient basis fashions, studying from demonstration, and reinforcement studying, aimed toward manufacturing duties which can be complicated and unstructured.
The lab has already generated new mental property and can proceed to as this work advances.
The mandate is scalable deployment: validating new bodily AI capabilities in opposition to the reliability, price, and variability necessities of actual manufacturing strains.
Because the underlying fashions mature, Vention expects the complexity prices of deploying to drop, widening the vary of producers who can put bodily AI to work on their flooring.
Canada’s ‘main bodily AI lab for manufacturing’
With know-how deployed throughout hundreds of producers globally, together with 90 of the Fortune 500, Vention’s scale provides researchers direct entry to actual manufacturing environments and a steady stream of commercial manipulation information to post-train Bodily AI fashions.
Bodily AI is Vention’s fastest-growing section, with associated income up 400 p.c over the previous 12 months. That mixture of educational analysis and a stay industrial base units the lab other than different trade gamers. Mannequin growth is formed by benchmarks, but in addition by shopper suggestions, manufacturing challenges, and day-to-day deployment conversations.
Etienne Lacroix, founder and CEO of Vention, says: “Bodily AI will basically develop what producers can automate, however the problem is now not merely proving {that a} robotic can carry out a activity in a lab.
“The true 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’ve a singular basis to shut that hole.”
Dr Jimmy Li, director of bodily AI, says: “What makes this lab totally different is the loop we’ve constructed: tutorial analysis feeding straight into stay manufacturing issues, and manufacturing suggestions feeding again into the analysis.
“Our shoppers 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 quicker from a analysis end result to one thing that truly runs on a manufacturing unit ground.”
From AI analysis to industrial deployment
Vention’s bodily AI lab is led by Dr Jimmy Li, a robotics and machine studying researcher from McGill College who brings greater than a decade of peer-reviewed analysis expertise and deep experience in laptop imaginative and prescient, robotic notion, autonomous methods, and AI-powered robotic manipulation.
Over the previous two years, he has spearheaded Vention’s bodily AI technique and led its technical collaboration with Nvidia, translating advances in AI analysis into business robotic purposes deployed on manufacturing unit flooring.
A key innovation from the bodily AI lab is GRIIP, launched in February 2026. It’s a modular bodily AI pipeline that spans scene digitalization, object segmentation, pose estimation, grasp choice, and collision-free movement planning, leveraging basis fashions from know-how leaders together with Nvidia in addition to Vention’s proprietary fashions.
As a continuation of the event course of, Vention will launch a public GRIIP Software program Improvement Package (SDK) enabling engineering groups to additional develop the pipeline to suit their distinctive wants.
Vention can also be working with world industrial and electronics producers, together with a big automotive OEM on high-complexity, unstructured robotic duties in ultimate meeting.
Bringing world-class AI experience to industrial robotics
Dr Pineau joins Dr Li in an advisory capability as exterior technical advisor. Her contributions will span mannequin structure choices, analysis prioritization, and connections into the broader AI neighborhood because the lab expands its work on the intersection of basis fashions, robotics, and industrial automation.
