If you have watched the robotics world, you will recognize the company called OnRobot (Odense, Denmark) as a leading provider of grippers, and of late, a leading supplier of robotic solutions software. At Automate 2025, a delay in equipment delivery made a press conference more exciting than planned, as OnRobot partner/integrator Doig (Cedarburg, WI) was tasked with creating a live demo in a meeting room, complete with robot, conveyor and pallet, with a little over an hour before the press conference began.
It was the acid test of the software, and the Doig crew worked through the two presentations to bring up the system for a physical demonstration. It worked and proved the point beyond any doubt: configuration is fast and accurate. After the press event, OnRobot CEO Enrico Iversen spoke with Fifth Wave Manufacturing about his company’s path to its original purpose: decreasing the time and complexity in deploying robotic solutions.
Fifth Wave Manufacturing: We are here once again at Automate 2025 with Enrico Iversen. We just had a wonderful demonstration this morning on D:PLOY being used in a palletizing application. The system got here, because of shipping oddities, an hour and a half ago. And so, it was a true demonstration of the quickness of deploying that particular application. When did you launch D:PLOY?
Enrico Iversen: Two years ago.
FWM: When that came out, it was a great demo, but it turns out we were only seeing the tip of that iceberg. We have something today with the palletizing application that also is only the tip of the iceberg. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how that evolved?
Iversen: I think it evolved in two ways. Within the last couple of years, there had been a lot of technical development in D:PLOY. When you bring out a new platform, there are things that that you maybe didn’t include or do a hundred percent correct the first time. So of course, there’s an involvement in the software, adding features, adding functionality. The D:PLOY you see today is a different animal than the one we launched two years ago. I think we also did a lot of changes on the commercial side because selling software into the automation industry is not necessarily easy and it’s not what people are looking for.
FWM: It’s not! They’re looking for robots moving things around. And they’re getting it with the software. They just don’t know the importance of that software yet.
Iversen: Exactly. We changed our focus to think, okay, what is it that people really need? They need a solution. They need to put boxes on a pallet, or they need to take their workpieces in and out of a CNC machine. That is the true challenge people have, and that is what we are now giving them in cooperation with our local partners.
FWM: And what’s interesting too, as I said, even though we were on palletizing today, you can just as easily say, oh, we need a machine tending application, so let’s do the machine tending application.
Iversen: You take the pallet away, and you have the exact same installation as you saw today—you move it next to a CNC machine without changing any other hardware, any other software. You will just—within an hour—set it up to run at the CNC station instead.
FWM: Wow. All right. So it would be like someone playing keeper and forward and midfield all at the same time.
Iversen: That’s a pretty good contract you would get, if you could do that <laugh>.
FWM: That would be a very nice contract. I didn’t realize, though, that let’s say this robot were on a cart or something, you could literally just say, hey, we need this over here. Or you’re having an emergency and you need you need a loading system. You would still turn to that same robot and system, and here we go.
Iversen: Exactly. You have a guy out sick, the robot takes over. You get an incremental order, the robot takes over and puts in the overtime. So yes, you get a lot of flexibility there.
FWM: Where have you seen early results? What types of industries have you seen?
Iversen: Actually, it’s not industry specific. We have seen some of the good number of installations in food and beverage. That is apparently an industry where you, where you quite often change your boxes. I could see that it’s definitely a good example. But other industries too, basically, if you look at manufacturing, most factories have something they need to box and palletize at some point.
FWM: For the people who do not, let’s say I make manhole covers, and that’s a little hard to palletize, but you can still stack and shrink wrap or rope or whatever But it’s not like you have to have cardboard boxes of small things to take advantage of what the robot can offer.
Iversen: You don’t have that. It could also be could be bags, it could be a lot of different things. Some of those things we can handle within the D:PLOY platform. Some of those things would fall under more traditional integration and would be robotics as you have seen it for the past 30 or 40 years. So we do both and we cover both segments of the market.
FWM: Okay. How have tariffs affected you, if at all?
Iversen: Well right now it hasn’t been more than than 10% on goods coming from from Denmark. And what what we decided from day one was to was just to give a discount so we completely offset the tariff in order to support our US partners. We take that on our shoulders. We hope it goes away soon, but for the time being, we take care of it.
FWM: I think we all wish it would go away. There is so much to D:PLOY. It’s great that you have a lot of integrators signed on with D:PLOY. How many integrators in the U.S.?
Iversen: In the U.S. we have two who have released applications, and then we have three or four more who are working on finalizing their solutions.
FWM: And you already have many who have already experienced your product with your end-of-arm technology.
Iversen: Yes, absolutely. If you look at more traditional integration, then we have many partners who have a lot of experience with our products and technologies.
FWM: I would imagine that’s a great pool from which to draw, maybe people who would use D:PLOY as well.
Iversen: You will draw some, yes, but you also you also need a different mindset, a different way of going to market. I think some of the people developing D:PLOY solutions will come from that pool of existing partners. But I also expect a lot of D:PLOY-based solutions to be developed by people who are not necessarily in the integration business today, because this is an easy way for them to get into automation. It’s an easy ay to develop a new business or if you want to be independent.
FWM: So you may not need to be an engineering-heavy company to be able to deploy D:PLOY.
Iversen: No, exactly. You can buy the gripper from us, the D:PLOY from us, the robot from whoever you want to buy from, and you can buy the base from somewhere. You don’t need to engineer that. So all the components are there, all you need to do is to go out and sell.
FWM: So they’re really more than just integrating a solution. They’re also a business partner.
Iversen: Absolutely. An important business partner for us, yes.
FWM: I know you’ve added at least one person to the U.S. team high up. And you’re probably looking for more people, I would guess.
Iversen: We have two open positions in the, in the U.S. right now. Yes.
FWM: Speaking of people, it’s funny, you have robot vendors like Fanuc, for example, who just added another 600,000 square feet to their footprint here in the state [of Michigan]. And it’s amazing that all of this is becoming so mainstream and that goes right along with who’s using the equipment. It’s not the engineer, it’s the end user. Can you talk a little bit about that? That had to be something to get used to from your end as well.
Iversen: No, I don’t think we need to get get used to it because this is basically what we have been pushing from day one. What is happening now is what we said would happen. Now we start seeing the first movement. I think we are still seeing very, very little, but it’s the same as when you had personal computers coming out. You know, many years ago it was like, who, who needs that? How do we get one? I remember when I got my first you know, portable PC back in the ‘80s…
FWM: It was probably a Compaq!
Iversen: I don’t even remember the box, but it was a box. It was eight kilo and, you know, it was a 40 megabyte hard drive, monochrome screen and everything. But it was a tool and it allowed us to do things. We see the same now with robotics. And with the computer, I didn’t need a programmer to help me. I could operate it myself. It’s the same we see with the robotics now. You don’t need a programmer. We can operate it ourselves in the factories. Once that becomes possible, and when people really understand that this is something that they can do and that it actually works, then I think we will see a very rapid rollout of robotic automation.
FWM: I think your analogy is perfect, because it feels very much like when PCs came out.
Iversen: I could use the first PC, but I never got really friendly with DOS. So I got another platform, I got Windows instead. Now, suddenly, it just took off. With D:PLOY, we give the people another easier to use platform. Again, a tool to make the whole industry take off.
FWM: When you started the D:PLOY idea, did you did you see OnRobot being a kind of glue that it’s becoming now because of the software?
Iversen: That has been the idea with On Robot and D:PLOY from the beginning. Everything we were doing were just stepping stones getting ready for D:PLOY. We needed the end-of-arm tools that could easily integrate and automate with D:PLOY. We needed the robot integration, so we had to do that first, and that was the stepping stone. But D:PLOY has always been the goal—getting robot application or the deployment of robot applications fully automated. That has been my goal since before I started OnRobot. For me, this was a natural continuation of the work we did with Universal Robots. We moved from easy robot setup to easy application setup. A natural evolution.
FWM: You have some victories under your belt, and there are more to come. I foresee an eventual evolution toward almost an ERP system, except it’s for robotics.
Iversen: Yes, I understand the analogy, but you can also say that ERP systems, even today, are not necessarily easy to set up and use.
FWM: <Laugh>. They’re not, but they hold the information, all the way down to what do you do with bent paper clips <laugh>.
Iversen: Absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. They’re good at monitoring your behavior <Laugh>.
FWM: That’s right. But the point is this takes care of the drill-down details. I don’t have to.
Iversen: Exactly, it’s done for you.
FWM: Truly amazing. What’s next for D:PLOY? What’s next for you?
Iversen: I think next for next for D:PLOY, we will be adding more applications, and of course we’ll be adding a lot more solutions with other business partners that we have here in the States and around the world. I think next for me is just keep pushing and making sure that we get ease of use out to people so that they can take advantage of it in their factories.
FWM: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time, and thank you very much for coming. We surely appreciate it.
More information: www.onrobot.com