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Technology
Behind the Scenes with
Vision-Guided Industrial Mobile Robots
Despite futuristic connotations, the use of robotics in industrial settings has been around since the mid 1900s. Some of the earlier robotics applications such as lifting and pulling loads around warehouses, are still in use today in manufacturing plants and distribution centers around the world. Yet widescale deployment has yet to happen and most applications involve fixed tasks (i.e., welding parts in an auto assembly line).
So why aren’t mobile robots more commonplace in industrial settings today?
- Robotics is difficult.
- Robotics technology is expensive.
- Robotics solutions aren’t flexible
Enter Seegrid
In order for robots to be truly effective they need to sense, move, analyze, interact and repeat. They need to become autonomous or self sufficient and “learn” the required tasks directly from the people that work with them each day.
The minds at Seegrid have been at work on robotics technologies since the late 1970s, and a series of breakthroughs and evolutionary developments have worked together to allow Seegrid to deliver the future of industrial mobile robotics today.
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Dr. Hans Moravec, Seegrid’s Chief Scientist, invented and pioneered the use of 3D evidence grid technology for machine navigation and perception. Evidence grid technology is a software mechanism that breaks the world down into a probabilistically weighted grid. Evidence grid technology, properly applied, allows robots to sense and interpret their environment.
- Increased robot capabilities can be linked directly to the evolution of computer power. Software which has been developed over the last 30 plus years had to wait until computer size (smaller), cost (cheaper) and power (faster) caught up to make industrial mobile robotics commercially and technically feasible. IMR technology is not heuristic but probabilistic which scales as CPU and storage increases.
- IMR requires many disciplines including physics, mathematics, computer programming, and electrical and mechanical engineering to come together to create a reliable, cost effective solution. Seegrid brings together these minds and resources.
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