How autonomous robots will take over the materials handling needs of tomorrow, today. Drew Turney takes a trip through the transforming, moving future of industrial environments
If you weren’t aware, autonomous robots (AMRs) moving materials around factory, warehouse and manufacturing floors is a booming business. According to US AMR maker OTTO Motors by Rockwell Automation, it’s a billion-dollar market today, with market intelligence firm Interact Analysis predicting growth of 30% per year, with the field projected to be worth almost $6bn by 2027.
OTTO Motors’ VP of Product Jay Judkowitz says there’s an increasing imperative around reshoring manufacturing, and the best method to compete with the low-cost overseas manufacturing we’ve been using for a few decades is automation; what he calls ‘more plants in more places with fewer roles per plant, but more production and a greater number of safer and more fulfilling manufacturing jobs in aggregate’.
One of the areas most ripe for savings is in materials handling, with Judkowitz citing research that says it uses about 25% of the workforce, 55% of the floorspace and 87% of the production time in a factory. Showcasing their work in September 2023 at a trade show in Boston, an OTTO Motors company rep said their customers were seeing ROI within just 12 months.
Upward mobility
As with any technology, widespread adoption will lead to increased innovation which will lift the tide overall, a phenomenon we’re already seeing.
Research from the University of Washington is enabling robots to identify objects in cluttered spaces just like humans can discern ‘object unity’ when something’s (for instance) partially obscured.
There’s also a lot of exciting work happening in space. Dr Kimberly Hambuchen at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre has been observing AMRs’ work in unique circumstances, where communicating with a robot might take anything from a few seconds to an hour while commands and responses are sent between Earth, orbit, the moon, Mars and beyond.
What’s more, radio transmissions have much lower bandwidth than the Gigabit Ethernet we’re used to on Earth, limiting the amount of data we can transmit and thus the complexity of commands.
Then there are the limitations of spacecraft-borne computer control systems, which don’t have comparable processing power of devices on Earth because of the protection they require against the harsh conditions of launch and space travel.
“My work’s led to new methods for supervisory control of robotics,” Hambuchen says, “and it’s applicable to terrestrial systems because it’s a more efficient way of controlling robots that decreases the human operator’s workload, giving more decision-making to the robot.”
Of course, spacegoing robots will also give us material and construction advances that could lead to far hardier AMRs on Earth, thanks to research fortifying them against the punishing vibrations of a rocket launch, radiation protection, the accumulation of dust, etc.
The new generation
Material handling robots on factory floors are nothing new, of course – we’ve had Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) that followed predetermined tracks for decades.
The difference in an AMR is the intelligence that lets it go from ‘guided’ to ‘autonomous’. In AMRs, the computing technologies needed are found in the robot, not just the network, according to Judkowitz.
“AMRs need to quickly perceive, assess and respond to adverse situations, doing their own obstacle avoidance, replanning or remapping without getting confused, lost or creating a safety hazard,” he says.
That means that where AGVs only need a track on the floor and a sensor to follow it, AMR sensor technology might be everything from cameras and radar to Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), ultrasonic (audio pings outside the frequency of human hearing), infrared and any combination thereof.
And as Michał Kierul, CEO of Poland-based technology developer INTechHouse and a 20-year veteran of software, electronics and mechanics design, explains, those combinations are as variable as the factory you’ll find them in.
“Cameras are efficient for visual recognition but might struggle in low-light conditions,” he says. “LIDAR, using lasers to measure distances and create 3D maps, offers accurate depth perception but can be expensive. Radar, akin to LIDAR, uses radio waves, suitable for varying weather conditions. Ultrasonic sensors measure distance using sound waves, useful for proximity sensing.”
OTTO Motors uses a technology called SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) that uses LIDAR to probe the environment with a laser, comparing the readings with a pre-programmed map of its work and letting the robot plot its position in the map accurately.
“The LIDAR hits also tell the robot if there’s something in its path that demands a reaction,” says Judkowitz. “[Programming] informs the hardware how close an object is allowed to come to the robot before it must slow down or stop.”
A command system then handles the path planning, and decides how and when to reroute, and the navigation software maximises speed and smoothness in the performance envelope dictated by the safety system. The external fleet manager connects to each robot in the network, distributes maps to them, dispatches jobs to the optimal robot, proxies factory integration, manages charging and provides the management interface for the robots themselves.
Safety first
Of course, the first concern everybody should have before letting self-driving robots loose in their factory is safety.
OTTO Motors says their products are themselves addressing safety concerns, with Judkowitz calling materials handling ‘a major source of injury, whether due to repetitive stress of manual moves or collisions from manually driven forklifts.’
But how do producers make AMRs themselves safe? Kierul thinks of warehouses like big carparks, with individual units trying to get from A to B. “You have to map the whole warehouse and make sure it always looks the same, coordinate the location data from other robots and ensure laws (like traffic laws) so if two robots meet, they know which one gets right of way.”
Steffen Kluth, product manager at CNC Machine provider ANCA, agrees, saying safety is the most important aspect when humans and robots work in the same environment.
“Safety measures that can be implemented so robots and humans can interact safely include sensors that monitor the movements of both robots and humans in the work area, emergency stop switches if a problem occurs and guards that prevent humans from entering movement areas.”
He says that the safety measures of AMRs evolved out of the AGV world – which also used sensors to detect nearby movement – but the same expanded use of sensors in AMRs (LIDAR, visual cameras, sonar, radar, etc.) can also be used for the safety measures. Better still, he mentions both Australian and international standards regulating AMR safety that already exist.
Speaking of standards, plenty of processes in manufacturing operate on accepted standards so robots from one provider can use grippers or effectors from another seamlessly. Will we see similar standards adopted by the effectors on AMRs, opening the field to more cross-pollination?
Judkowitz says that despite the industry’s size and growth, it’s early days, and while players try to differentiate themselves from competitors they’ll be advancing their own products (and standards).
But he adds that standards are starting to emerge in some parts of the technology stack (a trend he puts OTTO Motors at the forefront of). “Elements that can be standardised over time are things like communication, map format, traffic management and charging.”
Judkowitz also extols the virtues of open-source development as a way of establishing de facto standardisation. “Most AMRs today – including ours – are based on the [open source] Robot Operating System (ROS) platform governed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation. That makes it much easier to build and deploy tools and products adjacent to the AMRs themselves.”
The robotic community
Finally, there’s the public role in robotic advances. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources is due to release its National Robotics Strategy soon, which will hopefully include incentives for Australian businesses to develop and adopt robotic automation.
Meanwhile, overseas, NASA is maintaining its standing as an economic enabler, and after its research has given the world everything from freeze-dried food to memory foam, Hambuchen says NASA works with private industry in a multitude of ways – just one agreement is with our own Woodside Energy.
“We partner with many companies that have similar goals about robots operating in uncrewed habitats with difficult environments both inside and outside the space industry,” she says.
All this means the rise of self-controlling manufacturing materials robots is very much at hand…