Conquering the Two Frontiers of Mobile Robotics

Dr. Nicola Tomatis, CEO of BlueBotics, and Jacques Flamant, VP of Sales, presented an overview of the two most pressing challenges facing the adoption and scaling of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in material handling: outdoor operation and interoperability. The presentation was part of the Future of Electrification conference. BlueBotics, a Swiss company and technology supplier, is a ZAPI GROUP company and focuses on autonomous navigation, aiming to enable vehicle automation.

The Sticky Indoor-Outdoor Transition

Jacques Flamant introduced the first major challenge: achieving seamless operation when moving material from indoor environments to outdoor locations and vice versa. While the automation of fully indoor material handling is now well-established, systems generally work robustly only when the environment is adapted to the navigation technology.

Currently, moving material between buildings is highly inefficient. It often requires three separate solutions: 1) an indoor system that moves materials to the door, 2) a manual (usually human-driven) outdoor system to pick up the load, and 3) a second indoor system for final internal distribution. This expensive and complex process hinders the growth of automation in common applications such as steel manufacturing or transferring finished goods between production and logistics buildings.

The difficulty is twofold:

1. Indoor systems (for instance, those relying on natural navigation or laser triangulation) fail outdoors due to the lack of visible features or references needed to calculate the vehicle’s position.
2. Outdoor systems (driven by high-precision GPS/GNSS, often with RTK) cannot function inside because they lose the required satellite signal.

ANT Everywhere: Sensor Fusion for Seamless Navigation

The solution proposed is the incorporation of both technologies into a single navigation stack, allowing vehicles to transition smoothly between environments. This breakthrough requires sensor fusion - taking data from both natural navigation and high-precision GNSS with Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning, and prioritizing whichever data source is most reliable. BlueBotics labels this technology "ANT Everywhere".

ANT Everywhere uses a fixed base station installed on-site, which receives positioning data from GNSS satellites. This base station corrects the GNSS data before sending those corrections to an ANT Everywhere receiver on the AGV. This process transforms the typical 3-meter accuracy of GNSS to centimeter-level precision.

The system intelligently utilizes its inputs concurrently:

• Inside a building, where features are visible, the vehicle uses its standard odometry, IMU, and laser scanner data.
• Moving outside, as visible features diminish, GNSS begins to play a stronger role.
• Further away, where features are no longer visible to the lasers, GNSS data is given priority.

This seamless transition opens up broader industries, including steel and aluminum production, and particularly airports, where logistics processes are decades behind.

The Interoperability Imperative

Tomatis addressed the second challenge: interoperability, meaning different vehicles must be able to work together. This is vital for automating large-scale facilities or international companies. Companies cannot rely on a single supplier because no provider can offer all the vehicle models needed, and purchasing departments fear being dependent on one technology provider.

Historically, this was managed through a simple, pragmatic method called an interlock or "traffic light mechanism". Separate fleets, controlled by their own fleet managers, coordinate only at points of potential conflict (like shared crossings). When one system needs to enter a shared segment, it blocks it via a request to the other system. While simple, this approach only allows separate optimization and prevents global system optimization.

The Standardized vs. Ecosystem Debate

Market initiatives have recently pushed for standards - using a standardized communication protocol to allow a single, centralized fleet manager to coordinate multiple vehicles from different suppliers. These standards operate on different levels, aiming ultimately for Level 3: global optimization of all fleets.

The most mature initiative is the VDA 50/50, driven by German automotive and material handling associations (VDA and VDMA). Although working toward Level 2, the standard is only partially deployed and incomplete. Key limitations include:

• The need to develop custom software "dialects" for every integrated vehicle type leads to significant investment and cost.
• The standard only defines communication, forcing the use of separate, often conflicting tools to define the plant project for different vehicle technologies.
• The lack of guarantee regarding backward compatibility makes it a risk for future-proofing.

As an alternative to standards that rely on the "least common denominator," BlueBotics promotes the ecosystem approach. An ecosystem uses a single technology stack to integrate different vehicle brands and types into a unified system. This native interoperability ensures that the totality of the technology’s functionality is utilized, maximizing value, unlike standards, which often require relinquishing special features. BlueBotics’ technology, ANT, already enables over 150 vehicle types to work together.

The Automated Future

Tomatis predicts that the future of logistics will be dominated by a mix of solutions, but he assigned the highest probability (70%) to a few dominant ecosystems winning the market share in the next five to ten years, arguing that the costs and overhead of incomplete standardization initiatives are too high. BlueBotics maintains a neutral stance by participating in its own ecosystem while also implementing VDA 50/50 compatibility.

The challenges of indoor/outdoor operation and interoperability are highly complementary. Successful implementation will drive automation into new areas like recycling and agriculture, the latter of which desperately needs automation to address demographic issues and labor shortages. New technologies, like advanced safety scanners with heating systems to fight condensation, are also required to ensure reliability when vehicles move from cold or harsh outdoor conditions back indoors.

To see the full presentation, please see the on-demand video below: