Interoperability and Orchestration of Autonomous Mobile Robots (IO-AMRs) project.

SANDY,UT–

Romaric Corporation participated of the Interoperability and Orchestration of Autonomous Mobile Robots (IO-AMRs) project, for the ARM Institute.  The project was primed by Siemens Corporation, in collaboration with Romaric, FedEx, Yaskawa, Waypoint Robotics, Wibotic, Vecna Robotics and the University of Memphis.

Some of the project’s accomplishments are:

•  The development of core technology modules that tackle open problems in the deployment of mixed fleets of AMRs.
• The modules were integrated in a Use Case Orchestrator that effectively includes a mixed fleet of AMRs and robotic ARMs in a real-world use case provided by partner FedEx.
• The modules build on newly developed open standards for AMR communication, like the MassRobotics AMR Interop Standard.

The developed system offers the following value propositions:

1) Efficiency and Flexibility: The proposed system offers the possibility to orchestrate a multivendor fleet of AMRs. The end user can mix and match from a large variety of robots to suit their warehouse use case needs to maximize the throughput in their operations.

2) Acquisition Cost: The end user has full freedom to mix and match AMR vendors in their use cases without having the financial burden imposed by the development of ad hoc software connectors from scratch.

3) Sustaining Cost: The end users are no longer locked in vendor ecosystems and can adapt and scale their operations by including new or more robot instances of any vendor with the minimum effort.

4) Modularity: The software contributions are well defined into separate interoperable modules, such as the Multi-Map Manager (3D-EMAS), the communication driver API and the 4 communication driver implementations. While the previous were integrated in the Use Case Orchestrator (also a modular component) they can and will be integrated into other fleet managers.