Situation
Cell and gene therapies have the potential to transform the treatment of cancer, autoimmune diseases, and many other serious conditions. However, while the science continues to advance, manufacturing remains one of the industry’s greatest barriers to wider patient access.
Unlike traditional pharmaceuticals, cell therapies are complex, labour-intensive products that are often manufactured one patient at a time. Scaling production to treat thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of patients requires a fundamentally different approach to manufacturing.
Cellular Origins was founded to solve the challenge of cell therapy manufacturing at scale. Its Constellation platform combines mobile robotics, AI-driven orchestration, and proven bioprocess technologies to create fully automated cell therapy manufacturing within a customer’s existing or new facility.
Problem
As the company progressed towards customer deployment, it needed to demonstrate that complex manufacturing operations could be reliably coordinated across a highly automated factory environment. This required precise robotic manipulation, material movement, sterile fluid transfer, and seamless integration between multiple manufacturing technologies — all while maintaining the consistency, predictability, and control required for future commercial-scale production.
While MoveIt 2 open source enabled complex multi-stage motion sequences, the issues of planning performance and determinism became limiting factors as system complexity increased. Longer planning times and occasional unpredictability introduced operational risk in a production setting where reliability is essential. At the same time, Cellular Origins had achieved sub-millimetre robot-plus-camera repeatability through careful calibration and perception improvements. That level of precision raised the bar for motion execution: planning needed to be not only collision-free, but repeatable and robust under factory conditions.
Compounding the challenge, their systems are destined for air-gapped, highly regulated pharmaceutical environments. They needed industry-grade, industry-compliant motion software that could integrate cleanly, deploy securely, and scale — without slowing down their aggressive path to market.
Solution
Cellular Origins selected MoveIt Pro Core as the motion foundational libraries for their integrated mobile robot platform — not as a replacement for their architecture, but as a way to strengthen it. Rather than forcing new software architecture, MoveIt Pro Core integrated seamlessly with their Python-first ROS™ 2 stack and existing orchestration layer, giving engineers more capability without sacrificing control.
Working closely together, the teams focused first on what mattered most: planning performance and determinism in constrained factory workcells. By collaborating with PickNik, Cellular Origins was able to optimize the implementation, improve planner configuration, and better integrate with their multi-stage motion workflows. “We were able to achieve measurable speed improvements with MoveIt Pro Core — from roughly 10 seconds per motion plan to under 1 second!” said Leo Steenson, Head of Robotics.
Motion planning evolved from a bottleneck into a reliable foundation for sterile welding, tube routing, and precision handling tasks. At the same time, MoveIt Pro Core strengthened planning scene management and tool-change handling across modular factory stations, supporting the complex, high-mix environments required for automated cell therapy production.
Offline deployment options were aligned with pharmaceutical security requirements, ensuring the system could operate in air-gapped customer facilities. Throughout the engagement, PickNik moved quickly in collaboration with Cellular Origins’ engineering team — iterating on feedback, refining Python interfaces, and resolving deployment constraints.
Outcome
With MoveIt Pro Core integrated into their platform, Cellular Origins transformed motion planning from a development hurdle into a competitive advantage. Building on the strong foundation they had already created — from precision calibration to modular factory design — they now had a motion layer capable of matching their ambition. Planning became faster and more predictable, enabling their integrated mobile robots to operate confidently inside complex, highly constrained factory environments.
Just as importantly, working with PickNik allowed Cellular Origins’ engineering team to move forward without being slowed by infrastructure problems. Instead of spending cycles fighting motion instability or deployment constraints in air-gapped customer facilities, they focused on refining processes, scaling modules, and advancing toward factory rollout.
MoveIt Pro is PickNik Robotics’ commercial robotics software platform that extends the capabilities of the open-source MoveIt project. Designed for unstructured environments, MoveIt Pro provides powerful tools for motion planning, grasping, perception, and behavior sequencing. With pre-built robot behaviors and a modular runtime architecture, MoveIt Pro significantly reduces engineering effort and time-to-deployment. Its hardware-agnostic design supports a wide range of commercial and custom robotic arms, making it ideal for scalable automation across space, manufacturing, and logistics sectors.
