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Slamcore Aware is designed to be simple and quick to commission. Source: Slamcore
Just as advanced driver-assist systems, or ADAS, mark progress toward autonomous vehicles, so too can spatial intelligence assist manually driven vehicles in factories and warehouses. At MODEX today, Slamcore Ltd. launched Slamcore Aware, which it said can improve the accuracy, robustness, and scalability of 3D localization data for tracking intralogistics vehicles.
“Prospective customers tell us that they are looking for a fast-to-deploy and scalable method that will provide the location data they desperately need to optimize warehouse and factory intralogistics for speed and safety,” stated Owen Nicholson, CEO of Slamcore. “Slamcore Aware marks a significant leap forward in intralogistics management bringing the power of visual spatial awareness to almost any vehicle in a way that is scalable and can cope with the highly dynamic and complex environments inside today’s factories and warehouses.”
Robots and autonomous machines need to efficiently locate themselves, plus map and understand their surroundings in real time, according to Slamcore. The London-based company said its hardware and software can help developers and manufacturers with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).
Slamcore asserted that its spatial intelligence software is accurate, robust, and computationally efficient. It works “out of the box” with standard sensors and can be tuned for a wide range of custom sensors or compute, accelerating time to market, said the company.
Slamcore Aware brings AMR accuracy to vehicles
Slamcore Aware collects and processes visual data to provide rich, real-time information on the exact position and orientation of manually driven vehicles, said Slamcore. Unlike existing systems, the new product can scale easily across large, complex, and ever-changing industrial sites, the company claimed.
Slamcore Aware combines the Slamcore software development kit (SDK) with industrial-grade hardware, providing a unified approach for fast installation on intralogistics vehicles and integration with new and existing Real Time Location Systems (RTLS).
It incorporates AI to perceive and classify people and other vehicles, said Slamcore. RTLS applications can use this enhanced data to significantly improve efficiency and safety of operations, it noted.
The new product brings SLAM technologies developed for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to manual vehicles, providing estimation of location and orientation of important assets with centimeter-scale precision, said the company.
With stereo cameras and advanced algorithms, the Slamcore Aware module can automatically calculate the location of the vehicle it is fitted to and then create a map of a facility as the vehicle moves around. It can note changes to layout and the position of vehicles, goods, and people, even in highly dynamic environments, Slamcore said.
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‘Inside-out’ approach offers scalability
Existing navigation systems require the installation of receiver antennas across facilities to provide “line-of-sight” connectivity, said Slamcore. However, they become more expensive as facilities scale, with large or complex sites needing hundreds of antennas to track even a handful of vehicles.
Even with this expensive infrastructure, coverage is often unreliable, reducing the effectiveness of RTLS and warehouse robots, Slamcore said. The company said Slamcore Aware addresses these industry pain points.
The system takes an “inside-out” approach that scales in line with the number of vehicles deployed, regardless of the areas they must cover or the complexity of internal layouts. As new vehicles are added to the fleet, an additional module can be simply fitted to each one so that every vehicle automatically and continuously determines its location wherever it is across the whole site, said Slamcore in a release.
Visual spatial intelligence data is processed at the edge, onboard the vehicle, explained the company. Position and orientation data is shared via a lightweight and flexible application programming interface (API) for use in nearly any route-planning, analytics, and optimization platform without compromising performance, it said.
Slamcore is offering Slamcore Aware to facility operators, fleet management and intralogistics specialists, systems integrators, and other RTLS specialists. The company is exhibiting at MODEX in Atlanta for the first time this week at Booth A13918. It will also be at LogiMAT in Stuttgart, Germany.