How It All Started

The Seegrid testing area

Seegrid Corporation was founded in Pittsburgh, PA in February 2003 as a spinout of Carnegie Mellon University’s Mobile Robot Lab. Dr. Hans Moravec and Dr. Scott Friedman co-founded Seegrid to develop a new class of affordable industrial mobile robots that operate reliably in dynamic environments. Seegrid’s core Industrial Mobile Robotics (IMR) technology has more than 30 years of innovation and research behind it and overcomes the traditional hurdles of robotic adoption.

Need is great. Use is minimal.

Despite increasing labor costs, high employee turnover, high worker compensation costs, labor shortages and health and safety concerns, the lifting, transporting and depositing of materials is still largely powered by people using material handling equipment. Why is material handling robotic equipment virtually nonexistent in distribution centers and warehouse environments?

Need is great

Contrary to popular representations, even very simple tasks like moving around in unstructured environments are notoriously difficult for robots. The vast majority of robots today are fixed in place or follow inflexible paths due to their inability to deal with dynamic environments. Combined with the high cost of hardware and installation costs these drawbacks have severely limited the adoption of robotics outside niche manufacturing applications. Seegrid was founded to directly address and overcome both of these drawbacks.

Software Centric Approach

Seegrid’s approach to solving challenging robotic tasks is to rely on intelligent software rather than expensive hardware. This fresh approach uses inexpensive sensors, draws solid conclusions from incomplete or bad data, and grows and improves robot capabilities with the increasing computational power of commercially available chipsets. The end result is a flexible, affordable and reliable robot that functions well in material handling environments.

Why “Seegrid”?

From its inception Seegrid has been solely focused on creating and delivering IMR technology. Our name reflects our focus: See (vision guided) grid (utilizing a 3D grid for navigational purposes). Our unique team of minds from all of the right disciplines – world-leading robot scientists, engineers, programmers, logistics practitioners and entrepreneurs – has turned more than 30 years of robotics innovation into affordable, dependable robots that deliver ROIs for your material handling environments.