Robotics Technician

The reindustrial revolution: partnering with ABB Robotics, Universal Robots, and NVIDIA. By Skild AI Team · Mar 19, 2026 Skild AI is partnering with ABB Robotics and Universal Robots to deploy its omni-bodied Skild Brain across industries and applications, from factory floors to collaborative systems, without task-by-task reprogramming. At Skild AI, Skild AI Inc. is laser-focused on a long-term mission to build general-purpose intelligence grounded in the physical world. Skild AI Inc. is developing a unified foundation model for Physical AI that can control any machine that moves. This foundation model, Skild Brain, displays what Skild AI Inc. call an omni-bodied intelligence - any robot, any task, one brain. Being omni-bodied, the Skild brain can ingest data from different robots and use it to improve itself, which in turn helps scale additional deployments that generate even more data. This forms a self-sustaining data flywheel where existing robots in the field help gather data to train the next improved generation. This is, however, a catch-22: robots need data to improve, but only capable robots can be deployed to gather it. Skild AI Inc. solve this with a phased approach: first deploy in semi-structured settings (industries, factories, etc.), which yield data for deploying in less structured ones (hospitals, hotels etc.), eventually leading to general-purpose robots which work everywhere, including fully unstructured environments such as homes. Today, Skild AI Inc. start a new chapter in taking the Skild Brain to mass deployments across industries by partnering with major robotics OEMs (original equipment manufacturers): ABB Robotics, Teradyne Robotics' Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR). Its partnership with these robotics OEMs will not only accelerate the large-scale deployment but also enable the establishment of the biggest data flywheel ever created for general-purpose physical AI. Deploying generalized robot intelligence with ABB Robotics and Universal Robots. Conventionally, industrial robots must be carefully programmed by human experts, task by task, and require extremely precise sensing. These hand-designed custom solutions are expensive: neither practical for industries where product changes regularly nor scalable to millions of small to medium businesses (SMBs). Its omni-bodied AI brain offers a fundamentally different approach: learning directly from data. For any new industrial task, the base Skild Brain model, which is an end-to-end neural network, will be finetuned with a small amount of task data in a process called post-training. This enables the shift from programming tasks to building systems that continuously learn and improve, even during deployment. By partnering with ABB Robotics and Universal Robots, its goal is to integrate the omni-bodied Skild Brain into their robot portfolios. By embedding the Skild Brain's shared intelligence layer into widely deployed industrial robots, manufacturers can extend automation into more dynamic, highly variable, and complex applications without needing to build task-specific code for every workflow. This could potentially revolutionize automation across SMBs. "At ABB Robotics, we see more autonomous and versatile robotics (AVR(TM) as the enabler for the next era of flexible and efficient manufacturing," said Marc Segura, President, ABB Robotics. "Integrating Skild AI's generalized robot intelligence into our portfolio will help customers scale industrial-grade automation more quickly and address increasingly complex application scenarios across a broad range of industries." "Universal Robots was founded to make automation simple and accessible," said Jean-Pierre Hathout, CEO, Universal Robots. "Working with Skild AI and NVIDIA allows us to bring advanced AI capabilities to our cobots - enabling them to handle more dynamic, variable tasks across industries." Partnership with NVIDIA in building omni-bodied intelligence. Training a robotic foundation model requires a large diversity of data, a process known as pretraining. But in robotics, there is no equivalent "Internet of robot data." Skild AI Inc. get around this problem by leveraging internet-scale human videos and large-scale robot simulations for pretraining. Skild AI Inc. has been working closely with NVIDIA to enable this pretraining at scale through NVIDIA Isaac Lab and Isaac Sim to create physically accurate simulations and NVIDIA Cosmos to generate and augment synthetic data, improving robustness and sim-to-real transfer. Today, Skild AI Inc. take this partnership further for deploying the Skild Brain in high-precision assembly for NVIDIA Blackwell systems with Foxconn. "Physical AI is transforming the world's largest industries," said Deepu Talla, Vice President of Robotics and Edge AI at NVIDIA. "Built on NVIDIA's open robotics platform and accelerated computing, Skild AI's generalized robot brain demonstrates how foundation models trained in simulation can be deployed on real robots at scale." Early success in advanced manufacturing. In partnership with NVIDIA and Foxconn, Skild AI Inc. will ship its omni-bodied brain to control dual robotic arms on NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU production lines, performing complex assembly operations requiring precise manipulation and adaptability. This is a complex, long horizon task demanding precision. The robot needs to pick and place a busbar, followed by a limit block, then drill 16 screws in succession, and finally remove the limit block. This is a real task, currently done by humans at a line in a Foxconn factory. Automating this with current automation solutions is extremely costly and requires extensive hand engineering. In the video above, Skild AI Inc. instead accomplish this with a fully end-to-end network. The Skild Brain is fine-tuned with a small amount of robot data (not necessarily even from a real robot). In-context memory allows for long-horizon task execution spanning several minutes. This approach completely removes the need for step by step programming by hand. If you watch closely, you will see the robot needs to adjust the drill and placement on the fly due to disturbances in the setup. Recovery behaviors like these are hard to program by hand, but are critical for completing the task reliably. What's next? Today's announcement with its OEM collaborators marks a key milestone in moving this technology toward generating real-world economic value and establishing an ever-growing data flywheel for physical AI. The Skild Omni-Bodied Brain will continue learning and compounding efficiency with every industry it enters. And this is only the beginning.

Skild faces real-world test of its robot brain in Nvidia, Foxconn factory deal. As Pittsburgh pushes to lead in physical AI, the partnership creates a major proving ground for automation in advanced manufacturing. Pittsburgh startup Skild AI will soon put its AI robot brain to the test as part of a deal with Nvidia and several companies specializing in advanced manufacturing. In partnership with electronics manufacturer Foxconn, Skild will deploy its AI model on the robotic assembly lines that build Nvidia's Blackwell GPU server systems in Houston, Texas. The large-scale deployment will help accelerate the startup's "data flywheel" - a self-reinforcing cycle in which the more tasks the robots perform, the more real-world data Skild's AI model collects, which in turn makes the model smarter and more capable over time, according to the company. "By training an omni-bodied intelligence that transfers skills across embodiments and environments, we're shifting from programming tasks to building systems that continuously learn and improve, even during deployment," Deepak Pathak, CEO of Skild AI, said in the announcement. The East Liberty-based unicorn is building a general-purpose AI model designed to power a wide range of robots and tasks with a single system. Its tech has attracted major investment since it launched in 2023, including a $1.4 billion raise in January that boosted the company's valuation to over $14 billion. The partnership appears to mark the first public mass-deployment of Skild's tech after years of testing, as it eventually plans to use the tech in both commercial and consumer settings. Skild did not immediately respond to Technical.ly's request for comment on the timeline of the partnerships or other industries the startup intends to target next. Nvidia invested in Skild's last two funding rounds and is helping the Pittsburgh company forge additional partnerships with ABB Robotics and Universal Robots to integrate its AI brain into their robot portfolios for additional advanced manufacturing purposes. Skild's model is currently being tested in a variety of settings, including security inspections, package delivery, warehouses, manufacturing, data centers and construction tasks. "This partnership helps us to bring automation and robotics for [small and medium-sized businesses]," Skild AI President Abhinav Gupta said in a prepared statement, "and non-traditional manufacturing and unlocks large-scale deployment of Skild Brain." Pittsburgh positions itself to lead automated manufacturing. The region's manufacturing strength and government support for robotics can position Pittsburgh as a model for building AI that can complete tasks in the real world, Technical.ly's 2025 RealLIST Connectors said at a September event. From 2017 to 2022, corporate investors and VCs invested $4.3 billion into Pittsburgh-based robotics companies, plus about $163 million from the federal government between 2015 and 2020. "With 17 new workforce training programs ranging from pre-apprenticeships to master's degree programming," Benjamin Pratt, senior VP of business investment at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, previously told Technical.ly, "we view the role of building a robust talent pipeline to support the growth of automation and the robotics and deep tech economy of Greater Pittsburgh as foundational." Nvidia has already played a part in this, including a joint research venture with Carnegie Mellon University and a $2 billion partnership with Butler County-based fiber optic manufacturer Coherent. Skild's wins add up, raising billions since launch. Last summer, Skild unveiled its Skild Brain. Videos showed the company's AI model being used in humanoid, dog and tabletop arm robots completing various tasks, like walking a dog or washing dishes. The company trains its model on videos of humans and physics-based simulations. Skild says, unlike traditional models, its AI is "omni-bodied," meaning it can control any robot without prior knowledge of its exact body form. It does this through in-context learning, or when the model is put into an unknown environment and adjusts its behavior based on lived experience in real time. Skild has raised more than $2 billion since it spun out from Carnegie Mellon University in 2023. Before the startup's $1.4 billion raise in January, it raised $500 million in April 2025 and $300 million in July 2024. However, there are no corresponding Form D filings under the Skild AI name with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which startups are required to file, though they can do so under an alias.