Formant Physical AI Fleet Orchestration Platform

Formant, Inc. is a San Francisco-based cloud robotics company that helps businesses operate robots from any vendor in production. Its customers span five continents and include some of the largest mobile robot fleets, with use cases from remote inspection to agricultural and service robots.

The platform has three capabilities. Fleet Orchestration tracks per-robot and per-mission history, assigns each task to the best-suited robot regardless of vendor and dispatches a robot or a person when something goes wrong, within permissions set by the customer. The Physical AI Layer lets teams query and direct the fleet in plain language with ML-driven, human-approved recommendations. The Egocentric Data Engine records time-synced video, sensor and intervention data from daily operations. Forward-deployed engineers support deployments in a structured boot-camp programme.

• Fleet Orchestration: assigns tasks to the best-suited robot across vendors with approval thresholds.
• Physical AI Layer: plain-language queries and commands with governed ML recommendations.
• Egocentric Data Engine: captures time-synced video, sensor and intervention records.
• Remote operations: teleoperation and remote diagnostics for distributed robot fleets.
• Observability: live status, events and mission tracking across sites.
• Deployment services: forward-deployed engineers run discovery, pilot, deployment and optimization.

• An oil and gas or power operator in Vietnam supervising remote inspection robots from a central room.
• A facility management company coordinating cleaning and delivery robots from several vendors across buildings.
• A Vietnamese robot maker using the platform for remote support of exported robots.

• One governed platform for robots from every vendor, instead of separate dashboards per OEM.
• Faster incident response through automatic dispatch of a robot or person when anomalies occur.
• Daily operations turn into structured, searchable data for review and model improvement.
• Forward-deployed engineers take customers from discovery to optimization in about seven months.

As robots move from pilots to production, the bottleneck shifts from robot capability to deployment, governance and data. Physical AI models also need large volumes of real-world operating data. Operators in Southeast Asia adopting inspection, cleaning and logistics robots need vendor-neutral tools to supervise mixed fleets across sites.

Formant, Inc. is based at 455 Market St, San Francisco. CEO and founder Jeff Linnell. The company moved its website from formant.io to formant.ai; the app remains at app.formant.io. Customer stories include BP, Burro, Hullbot, Canvas, Robotire and SoftBank Robotics America.