Otto Motors integrates its warehouse robots with Boston Dynamics’ robot dog

Otto Motors, a maker of autonomous mobile robots for warehouses and part of Clearpath Robotics, has integrated its warehouse robots with Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, Spot, as part of a demonstration. (See video below.)

The company says it combined its separate areas of expertise – from Clearpath and Otto – into “a dynamic real-world application using Boston Dynamics’ Spot”.

At the end of last year, Clearpath released a ROS software package for Spot which allows researchers to take full advantage of ROS capabilities out-of-the-box and leverage widely available open-source libraries and tools with Spot.

ROS stands for Robot Operating System and is an open-source software library that adds functionality to robots of all types.

With Clearpath’s ROS driver, users can unlock the ability to control Spot and access all the onboard sensing data streams, including odometry, images, and point clouds from each of the five on-board stereo cameras, plus data from any additional payloads they choose to integrate.

Otto Motors, on the other hand, is well known for its flexible and intelligent autonomous mobile robots for materials handling – such as Otto 100, Otto 750, and Otto 1500.

Otto staff members are also the minds behind the AMR fleet management software: Otto Fleet Manager, which can handle everything from traffic control, job supervision, to robot management, facility integration, and more.

Putting the Spot ROS Driver to the test

The team at Otto Motors thought it would be a compelling test case to see just how easy it would be to integrate Spot – using the ROS driver – into their test fleet.

In doing so they could also test the robustness of their autonomy and fleet manager software running on a completely new platform.

The video below shows James Servos, autonomy engineering manager at Otto Motors, recount their experience integrating Spot into the Otto Motor’s test fleet and see Spot mingle with a fleet of Otto AMRs.