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MasterMover partners with BlueBotics for AGV Navigation

March 22, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

MasterMover, a manufacturer of electric tug and tow solutions, has agreed a new partnership with vehicle automation company BlueBotics to provide ANT navigation technologies for MasterMover’s range of automated guided vehicles.

Known for its broad portfolio of pedestrian operated electric tugs and electric tows, used across Industrial Manufacturing, Logistics, and Retail, MasterMover also offers a range of advanced solutions, spanning remote control operation, line follow navigation, and fully autonomous solutions.

MasterMover says its AGV products now include BlueBotics’ ANT natural navigation technology as standard, ensuring customers benefit from the “advanced features and functionality available from the vehicle navigation market leader”. [Read more…] about MasterMover partners with BlueBotics for AGV Navigation

Filed Under: Logistics, News Tagged With: advanced, agv, ant, bluebotics, company, customers, electric, load, manufacturing, mastermover, moving, natural, navigation, range, solutions, technology, vehicle

Polymath Robotics and Hard-Line unveil autonomous bulldozer for construction industry

March 14, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Polymath Robotics and Hard-Line are proud to announce their collaboration on a solution for autonomous dozing.

In line with this collaboration, Hard-Line has been added to Polymath’s network of hardware integration partners, and Polymath has joined Hard-Line’s software integration ecosystem.

Hard-Line is a leading supplier of automation, teleoperation, and remote-control technology. No matter what type, make or model of machinery, Hard-Line can configure it to operate remotely. [Read more…] about Polymath Robotics and Hard-Line unveil autonomous bulldozer for construction industry

Filed Under: Construction, News Tagged With: autonomous, collaboration, dozer, ecosystem, hard-line, hardware, heavy, integration, navigation, polymath, polymath's, remote, robotics, software, solution, technology

Sevensense Robotics to showcase its Alphasense Autonomy Evaluation Kit at ProMAT

February 16, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Swiss 3D visual autonomy provider Sevensense Robotics says it is planning to present its Alphasense Autonomy Evaluation Kit at ProMAT 2023.

The software would enable “off-the-shelf prototyping solutions” for manufacturers of autonomous mobile robots, says the company.

Sevensense says automation has the potential to “exponentially increase efficiency, profitability, and safety in the logistics and manufacturing sectors”. But so far, the lack of a robust, yet flexible navigation technology has limited the scope and scale of automation in material handling operations. [Read more…] about Sevensense Robotics to showcase its Alphasense Autonomy Evaluation Kit at ProMAT

Filed Under: News, Software Tagged With: alphasense, amr, automation, autonomous, autonomy, capabilities, competitive, evaluation, kit, lack, limited, manufacturers, manufacturing, mobile, navigation, option, performance, promat, robotics, robots, sevensense, technologies, technology, vehicles

SICK launches ‘first’ 3D ToF camera with PL c

February 1, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

SICK introduces the first 3D time-of-flight (ToF) camera with Performance Level c (PL c) on the market – the safeVisionary2.

It was developed to support customers in becoming fully autonomous in addition to providing 3D localization and object recognition.

It is very effective for use on autonomous mobile robot because it provides precise 3D measurement data that allows for autonomous and intelligent mobile robot navigation. [Read more…] about SICK launches ‘first’ 3D ToF camera with PL c

Filed Under: Industry Tagged With: applications, automation, camera, data, enables, measurement, mobile, navigation, precise, protection, robot, robots, safety, safevisionary, service, sick

Intel Labs introduces SPEAR: An open-source photorealistic simulator for embodied AI

December 25, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

By Mike Roberts, a research scientist at Intel Labs, where he works on using photorealistic synthetic data for computer vision applications

Interactive simulators are becoming powerful tools for training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) systems, but existing simulators have limited content diversity, physical interactivity, and visual fidelity.

To better serve the embodied AI developer community, Intel Labs has collaborated with the Computer Vision Center in Spain, Kujiale in China, and the Technical University of Munich to develop the Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research (SPEAR).

This highly realistic simulation platform helps developers to accelerate the training and validation of embodied agents for a growing set of tasks and domains.

With its large collection of photorealistic indoor environments, SPEAR applies to a wide range of household navigation and manipulation tasks. Ultimately, SPEAR aims to drive research and commercial applications in household robotics and manufacturing, including human-robot interaction scenarios and digital twin applications.

Figure 1. Scenes may be cluttered with objects that can be manipulated individually. A strong impulse can be applied to all objects at the start of the simulation to create the disordered environment. Messy room configurations could serve as initial states for a cleaning task.

To create SPEAR, Intel Labs worked closely with a team of professional artists for over a year to construct a collection of high-quality, handcrafted, interactive environments. Currently, SPEAR features a starter pack of 300 virtual indoor environments with more than 2,500 rooms and 17,000 objects that can be manipulated individually.

These interactive training environments use detailed geometry, photorealistic materials, realistic physics, and accurate lighting. New content packs targeting industrial and healthcare domains will be released soon.

By offering larger, more diverse, and realistic environments, SPEAR helps throughout the development cycle of embodied AI systems, and enables training robust agents to operate in the real world, potentially even straight from simulation.

SPEAR helps to improve accuracy on many embodied AI tasks, especially traversing and rearranging cluttered indoor environments. Ultimately, SPEAR aims to decrease the time to market for household robotics and smart warehouse applications, and increase the spatial intelligence of embodied agents.

Challenges in Training and Validating Embodied AI Systems

In the field of embodied AI, agents learn by interacting with different variables in the physical world. However, capturing and compiling these interactions into training data can be time consuming, labor intensive, and potentially dangerous.

In response to this challenge, the embodied AI community has developed a variety of interactive simulators, where robots can be trained and validated in simulation before being deployed in the physical world.

While existing simulators have enabled rapid progress on increasingly complex and open-ended real-world tasks such as point-goal and object navigation, object manipulation, and autonomous driving, these sims have several limitations.

Simulators that use artist-created environments typically provide a limited selection of unique scenes, such as a few dozen homes or a few hundred isolated rooms, which can lead to severe over-fitting and poor sim-to-real transfer performance.

On the other hand, simulators that use scanned 3D environments provide larger collections of scenes, but offer little or no interactivity with objects.

In addition, both types of simulators offer limited visual fidelity, either because it is too labor intensive to author high-resolution art assets, or because of 3D scanning artifacts.

Figure 2. SPEAR enables embodied AI developers to train a navigation policy on an OpenBot entirely in simulation.

Overview of SPEAR

SPEAR was designed based on three main requirements:

  1. support a collection of environments that is as large, diverse, and high-quality as possible;
  2. provide sufficient physical realism to support realistic interactions with a wide range of household objects; and
  3. offer as much photorealism as possible, while still maintaining enough rendering speed to support training complex embodied agent behaviors.

Motivated by these requirements, SPEAR was implemented on top of the Unreal Engine, which is an industrial-strength open-source game engine. SPEAR environments are implemented as Unreal Engine assets, and SPEAR provides an OpenAI Gym interface to interact with environments via Python.

Figure 3. The LoCoBot Agent is suitable for both navigation and manipulation in simulation. This agent’s realistic gripper makes it ideal for rearrangement tasks.

SPEAR currently supports four distinct embodied agents:

  • The OpenBot Agent provides identical image observations to a real-world OpenBot, implements an identical control interface, and has been modeled with accurate geometry and physical parameters. It is well-suited for sim-to-real experiments.
  • The Fetch Agent and LoCoBot Agent have also been modeled using accurate geometry and physical parameters, and each has a physically realistic gripper. These agents are ideal for rearrangement tasks.
  • The Camera Agent can be teleported anywhere, making it useful for collecting static datasets.

Figure 3. The LoCoBot Agent is suitable for both navigation and manipulation in simulation. This agent’s realistic gripper makes it ideal for rearrangement tasks.

By default, agents return photorealistic egocentric observations from camera sensors, as well as wheel encoder states and joint encoder states. Additionally, agents can optionally return several types of privileged information.

First, agents can return a sequence of waypoints representing the shortest path to a goal location, as well as GPS and compass observations that point directly to the goal, both of which can be useful when defining navigation tasks.

Second, agents can return pixel-perfect semantic segmentation and depth images, which can be useful when controlling for the effects of imperfect perception in downstream embodied tasks and collecting static datasets.

SPEAR currently supports two distinct tasks:

  • The Point-Goal Navigation Task randomly selects a goal position in the scene’s reachable space, computes a reward based on the agent’s distance to the goal, and triggers the end of an episode when the agent hits an obstacle or the goal.
  • The Freeform Task is an empty placeholder task that is useful for collecting static datasets.

SPEAR is available under an open-source MIT license, ready for customization on any hardware. For more details, visit the SPEAR GitHub page.

Filed Under: Features, Science Tagged With: agent, agents, ai, embodied, environments, goal, navigation, objects, photorealistic, physical, realistic, simulation, simulators, spear, tasks, training

Point One Navigation launches new software for autonomous vehicles

December 20, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Point One Navigation, a specialist in precise positioning technology, has made its FusionEngine software compatible with ST’s TeseoAPP (Teseo ASIL Precise Positioning) GNSS Chipset.

Point One says the combined solution assures functional safety at ASIL-B, a critical requirement for Level 3+ ADAS systems.

The company describes its FusionEngine software as “a complete, high-performance ASIL-rated precise location solution for automotive applications”. [Read more…] about Point One Navigation launches new software for autonomous vehicles

Filed Under: News, Software Tagged With: achieve, applications, asil, automotive, autonomous, complete, functional, fusionengine, gnss, host, integration, integrity, navigation, point, positioning, precise, receiver, safety, software, solution, st, teseoapp

Labor shortages set to propel shipments of outdoor mobile robots to 350,000 by 2030

November 30, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Rapid advancements in fundamental techniques, such as navigation, manipulation, and functional safety, have made robots more intelligent, agile, and safer.

Mobile robots are a proven ideal companion for humans performing mission- and business-critical tasks in outdoor environments. According to global intelligence firm ABI Research, shipments of outdoor mobile robots will grow from 40,000 units in 2021 to reach 350,000 by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent.

With the successful deployment of mobile robots for successful navigation, manipulation, and functional safety in material handling, transporting, and cleaning, companies are now looking to deploy robots for outdoor applications for the same reasons. [Read more…] about Labor shortages set to propel shipments of outdoor mobile robots to 350,000 by 2030

Filed Under: Features, Robotics Tagged With: companies, major, mobile, navigation, outdoor, platform, robotics, robots, safety, su, vendors

aiMotive and Parkopedia partner to provide automakers with automated parking solutions

November 1, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Autonomous technology specialist, aiMotive, and indoor mapping provider and connected vehicle services company, Parkopedia, are now able to offer automakers scalable, autonomous parking solutions which minimise everyday parking hassles for drivers, without relying on the presence of additional infrastructure within parking facilities, thanks to a recent partnership.

The “out-of-the-box”, cost-effective and scalable parking navigation solution is able to provide navigational support for drivers within both indoor and outdoor parking facilities by utilising aiMotive’s perception technology, combined with localisation information provided by Parkopedia’s highly accurate Indoor Mapping service, which is described as “a unique, cost-effective, scalable indoor mapping solution for automakers looking to future-proof their navigation and deliver the driver convenience services expected today”.

Within Indoor parking facilities, such as underground and multistories, the line of sight to satellites is blocked which prevents access to GPS. [Read more…] about aiMotive and Parkopedia partner to provide automakers with automated parking solutions

Filed Under: Autonomous vehicles, Features Tagged With: aimotive, automated, drivers, indoor, navigation, parking, parkopedia, services

Clearpath Robotics launches outdoor autonomy software

October 28, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Clearpath Robotics, a manufacturer of mobile robotics platforms for research and development, today launched OutdoorNav – an autonomous navigation software platform designed for vehicle developers, OEMs, and robotics researchers.

Compatible with Clearpath’s outdoor mobile platforms as well as third-party industrial vehicles, OutdoorNav provides reliable GPS-based navigation for faster, more efficient autonomous vehicle development.

Bryan Webb, president of Clearpath Robotics, says: “Robotics product development can often be a difficult, sometimes harrowing experience. [Read more…] about Clearpath Robotics launches outdoor autonomy software

Filed Under: News, Software Tagged With: autonomous, clearpath, compatible, data, designed, developers, development, easily, interface, mobile, navigation, outdoornav, platforms, product, robotics, sensor, software, third-party, ugv, vehicle, vehicles, web-based

Hyundai business unit showcases new autonomous boat navigation technology

October 28, 2022 by Mai Tao Leave a Comment

HD Hyundai’s ship autonomous navigation subsidiary, Avikus, participated in the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, the world’s largest boat show, proving its leading capability in autonomous ship technology.

Avikus first introduced “NeuBoat”, the level 2 autonomous navigation solution for recreational boats, at this boat show in Florida, held from October 26 to 30.

NeuBoat is a combination of “neuron” and “boat”, implying Avikus’ AI autonomous navigation solution will play a critical role in self-recognition, decision, and control in various maritime conditions as human nerve cells do. [Read more…] about Hyundai business unit showcases new autonomous boat navigation technology

Filed Under: Features, Marine Tagged With: autonomous, avikus, boat, boats, navigation, solution

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Latest news

  • Factory Visit: Investment bankers tour client’s robot-filled machine shop
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