Harlond
Learn in the harbor.
Work out at sea.
Robots learn in a safe harbor, then set out for real work. We’re building vision AI, sim-to-real learning and friendly AI tools so advanced robot intelligence is something any team can pick up — not just the ones with a research lab.
- In development
- Open to collaborators
- Vision AI
- Sim-to-real
- Manipulators · Cobots · AMRs
The problem
Why robots are still hard to teach
Most robots on a factory floor are brilliant at one fixed motion and helpless the moment something changes — a new part, a different bin, a cloudy afternoon through the skylight.
- Slow
Teaching takes specialists
Vision setups, grasp points and paths are still tuned by hand, one cell at a time. Smaller manufacturers rarely have those specialists in-house.
- Risky
Practice on the line costs
Trial and error next to production costs time, parts and safety margin. Simulation is cheaper — but what works in sim often stumbles for real.
- Fiddly
Plugging in is a project
PLCs, production systems and monitoring all need wiring together — and every change on the line means doing some of it again.
Our approach
Practice in the harbor. Work out at sea.
- Simulated twin
- Practice at scale
- The crossing
- Real floor
- Learn & improve
We rebuild a robot’s working world — the arm, the parts, the cameras, the fixtures — as a physics simulation grounded in real measurements. In that safe harbor, perception and control policies can practise thousands of variations of light, pose and motion, and every mistake is free.
Then we help them make the crossing: checking against real data, closing the gap with calibration and careful fine-tuning, and keeping hard safety limits around everything a learned policy does. Once a skill is at work beside your PLC, what it sees flows back to make the next version better.
Around all of this sit AI tools meant for the people on the line, not just engineers: describe a task in plain words, ask why a cell stopped, or get help mapping signals to a PLC — so adopting robot intelligence feels less like a research project and more like a conversation.
What we’re working on
Three tracks
Research and service development, all in progress. We’re not selling products — we develop technology and services, ideally together with the people who’ll use them.
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Vision AI
Perception that copes with real conditions: jumbled bins, reflective metal, changing light. 2D and 3D, from finding a part to checking it’s right.
- Bin picking
- Pose estimation
- Visual inspection
- Calibration
Status: in development.
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Sim-to-real learning
Reinforcement- and machine-learning policies trained in simulation and carried over to real hardware — for grasping, placing, insertion and navigation.
- Manipulators
- Cobots
- AMRs
Status: in development.
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AI services
Agents and tools that make setup, teaching, monitoring and integration simpler for the people who run the line every day.
- Natural-language setup
- Line monitoring
- PLC integration
Status: in development.
Questions we’re exploring
- Sim-to-real transfer — policies that hold up on hardware with little real-world tuning
- Domain randomization — varied visuals and physics so models generalize
- Vision-language-action — linking what a robot sees, what you ask and what it does
- Safe collaboration — learned behavior that respects force, speed and shared space
- Data engines — synthetic and field data in one steady improvement loop
Robots we work with
One way of learning. Many kinds of robot.
Manipulators
Fixed industrial arms that pick, place, tend machines and assemble.
Cobots
Multi-joint collaborative robots that share a workspace with people.
AMRs
Mobile robots that carry parts between cells and around a busy floor.
How to work with us
Bring us your “too hard” list
Joint R&D
Explore an open question together — sim-to-real, perception or AI-assisted operation.
Proof of concept
Try an approach on one real task in one real cell before committing further.
Service development
Shape AI tools for setup, monitoring or integration around how your team actually works.
We’d especially like to hear from small and mid-sized manufacturers, robot system integrators and research labs connecting sim-to-real work with real hardware.
Contact
Come say hello
Tell us about your robot, your cell or your research question.
Harlond Technologies is currently in formation.