ARTI was finally granted public funding to further develop autonomous mobile robot technologies (more on this coming soon).
The transportation of goods and especially moving inventory from place to place are very common tasks. As good as every warehouse has to shift inventory around, this also applies in retail or production. It is a tedious task and it takes a lot of time where other crucial work could have been done and that’s why it is typically automated with robots. Early systems like Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) or Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are hitting the boundary of flexibility and performance due to several limitations. The next generation of AGVs are getting intelligent and that’s why they are called Intelligent Guided Vehicles (IGVs).
AMRs and AGVs have limited sensory information and therefore heavily rely on assumptions like an evenly flat floor, good lighting conditions and much more. Future use-cases require solutions beyond state-of-the-art, such that robots can seamlessly be integrated everywhere. No matter if the operating area is indoor, outdoor, across several floors, unstructured environments or in highly dynamic environments. Higher moving speeds and better overall performance in precision can reduce costs by 35% for end customers!
Our team is therefore leveraging state of the art technologies and algorithms in 3D computer vision, perception and control to bring next-gen performance to the masses.
The robot needs to understand where it is currently located and where it should go. This is done by using a predefined map of the operation area and today’s systems have limited map sizes and still work on 2D. As you probably have noticed, the left image is showing a 2D office area and the right one demonstrates a glimpse of a 3D map captured during a training session. This provides much more information to the AI for planning and reasoning which is crucial to understand what is dangerous and what to do next. Increasing the speed with knowledge and not just by adding more power.
The real next gen does not stop at 3D perception but thats just the start for a completely self-organizng robotic fleet. Keep on track for news and updated on the latest tech!
