Tag: Robots

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Clearpath To Provide GE Healthcare Repair Center With Self-Driving Vehicles

OTTO at GE Healthcare

A fleet of OTTO self-driving vehicles will automate just-in-time parts delivery within Milwaukee facility

(Kitchener, ON, Canada – April 21, 2016)  Clearpath, the developer of OTTO – a self-driving vehicle designed exclusively for material transport – has been selected to automate just-in-time parts delivery in a GE Healthcare repair facility being expanded near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“The OTTO fleet will optimize GE Healthcare’s just-in-time manufacturing process to help enable repair cells operate at full capacity,” said Matt Rendall, chief executive officer at Clearpath Robotics.

This GE Healthcare facility is a Repair Operations Center (ROC) that repairs medical equipment, tests functionality, recycles retired equipment, manages warranty service programs, and ships qualified high quality parts to field services to maintain a high level of customer fulfillment at locations in the United States and around the world. The fleet of OTTO self-driving vehicles will be used to load and deliver parts to work cells for repair. Once restored, OTTO will dispatch materials to shipping for return to customers.

“Clearpath’s OTTO self-driving vehicle and intelligent technology will help us serve our customers with speed, flexibility and accuracy, and gives us the ability to scale our operations going forward,” said Patricio Espinosa, director of Repair Operations for the Americas at GE Healthcare.

OTTO enables customers to improve throughput, reduce costs, and to stay flexible with the changing needs of their material flow process. The solution provides infrastructure free navigation, obstacle avoidance, human-safe collaboration, and a payload capacity of 3000 lbs.  Customers using OTTO self-driving vehicles typically experience a return on investment in 18-24 months.  For more information about OTTO, visit www.ottomotors.com.

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Clearpath Expands Line Of Self-Driving Vehicles For Industry

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OTTO 100 provides light-load material transport for today’s modern factories and warehouses

Clearpath Robotics expanded the OTTO line of self-driving vehicles with OTTO 100. The vehicle is designed for autonomous light-load material transport in factories and warehouses.

“The OTTO 100 takes the high quality and reliability of the OTTO 1500 and puts those advanced capabilities into a smaller form factor.” said Matt Rendall, Chief Executive Officer at Clearpath. “This enables new self-driving services in distribution, e-commerce, and manufacturing.”

The OTTO 100 system delivers dynamic and efficient light-load transport in increasingly congested industrial operations.  Traditional material handling systems require costly and rigid changes to infrastructure, cannot adapt to a changing environment, and are not safe for collaboration with warehouse personnel.  OTTO does not rely on external infrastructure for navigation, making implementation hassle-free and highly scalable.  OTTO 100 uses Clearpath’s self-driving OS to provide autonomous transport up to 220lb loads at speeds up to 4.5mph, while tracking along optimal paths and safely avoiding collisions.

OTTO 100 can be configured with a lift, bin carrier, or cart and integrates directly with ERPs via the OTTO enterprise fleet management system.

The OTTO family of self-driving vehicles includes OTTO 100 for light-load material transport and OTTO 1500 for heavy-load material transport. The entire OTTO material transport ecosystem will be showcased at MODEX 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia April 4-7 at Booth 3771.

For more information about the OTTO 100 self-driving vehicle, visit www.clearpathrobotics.com/otto-100.

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FTD Highrise’s Client List Grows

samrobot

by Peter Moreira

This article originally appeared on Entrevestor.com

Filip Sobotka believes the coming six months will be critical for his company FTD Highrise Inspection, as he secures a partner with the proper drone and gauges the best way to grow in Toronto’s condo market.

Working on his own for most of the past eight years, Sobotka has built up FTD into a company whose automated systems can inspect the exterior of a building to detect potential leaks or other problems. With sales rising, he is now in the process of securing a partnership with a drone operator that can conduct the inspections allowing Sobotka to focus on sales and product development. He will soon have to decide whether to seek financing, and it so what type and how much her should try to raise.

“Scalability’s not going to be a problem because we’re morphing into a software company,” said Sobotka in an interview. “The big thing for me now is to find the right partner … and build the software in such a way that it can handle so much data.”

Sobotka began FTD when he had a summer job with his father’s caulking company and noticed the difficulty engineers have inspecting the exterior of mid- and high-rise buildings. They essentially are lowered from the roof for a visual inspection, and then they extrapolate on what they can observe in their field of vision to draw conclusions on the state of the building.

Sobotka had a revelation one day when he saw and engineer tape a smartphone to a broomstick so he could reach around a corner and get a photo. He knew there was an opportunity for an automated solution.

His first iteration was a robotic device that would scale the exterior of a building, photographing every inch of it so all every problem could be detected and followed up on. Then drones became prevalent in many industries, so FTD now uses drones to inspect the whole building.

“It doesn’t matter where the problem is, we’ll find it,” he said. “You won’t have any surprises in terms of cracks turning into leaks.”

Having scanned 30 buildings in total, the company recently hit $40,000 in monthly revenue for the first time. Sobotka has found customers among condo boards, engineering firms and developers in the Greater Toronto Area. He’s winning repeat customers as some condo boards are now asking him to plan to do a follow-on scan in three years. And he’s also gaining traction with developers because FTD can scan a whole building and find any problems before the tradespeople have left the site.

FTD Highrise operates out of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre, and Sobotka was one of the presenters at the centre’s recent Client Showcase. Now he is focusing on finding the proper partner to carry out the scans, assess the market and decide on a funding strategy.

The opportunity is huge, he said, because the owners and developers of buildings want the peace of mind to know that there will be regular, complete scans of their structures to prevent problems.

“We’re becoming the standard of care for buildings in a way,” said Sobotka. “In five years, there’s no way you aren’t scanning all the buildings all the time.”

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Clearpath Announces Shift Into Self-Driving Vehicles For Industry

Canadian robotics manufacturer releases new warehouse robot with GE Ventures as strategic investor and GE as first customer.

OTTO_Small(Kitchener, ON, Canada – September 23, 2015)  Clearpath Robotics, a global leader in field and service robotics, today announced its first self-driving warehouse robot: OTTO. The announcement was made at RoboBusiness 2015 in San Jose, California. OTTO is designed for intelligent heavy-load transport in industrial environments and delivers improved throughput and decreased operating costs.

Introducing OTTO – The Self-Driving Vehicle for Heavy-Load Transport

Modern factories and warehouses need to be reconfigurable, responsive, and efficient to survive. Designed to address these conditions, OTTO uses the same underlying self-driving technology popularized by the Google self-driving car.  The system delivers dynamic and efficient transport in increasingly congested industrial operations.  Traditional material handling systems require costly and rigid changes to infrastructure, cannot adapt to a changing environment, and are not safe for collaboration with warehouse personnel.  OTTO does not rely on external infrastructure for navigation, making implementation hassle-free and highly scalable.  It can transport 3300 lb loads at speeds up to 4.5 mph, while tracking along optimal paths and safely avoiding collisions.

 

“North American manufacturers are constantly under pressure to find new ways to gain an edge against low-cost offshore competition. Traditional automation is saturating.  But what about the more complex tasks too difficult or expensive to automate?” said Matt Rendall, CEO and Co-Founder of Clearpath Robotics.  “We created OTTO to reinvent material transport and give North American manufacturers a new edge.”

Applications for OTTO include moving pallets in a warehouse or cross-dock, and for kitting or assembly line delivery.  OTTO units are currently deployed in five test facilities, the first of which belonging to GE.

Partnership with GE

GE has collaborated with Clearpath on service robot development since 2013 and recently became one of Clearpath’s first OTTO customers.  Today Clearpath also announced GE Ventures has become a strategic investor in the company for an undisclosed sum.

“We believe robotics will drastically improve the industries that GE serves,” said Ralph Taylor-Smith, Managing Director of GE Ventures.  “We look forward to further partnering with Clearpath and exploring the role large-scale service robots may play for us and for our customers in the future. This Clearpath investment from GE reflects a deepening of the industrial partnership in advanced manufacturing and field service operations with self-driving vehicles and service robots.”

“GE is one of the world’s most powerful and innovative brands,” said Rendall. “We are honored to partner with GE and we look forward to shaping the industry with them.”

A video of OTTO and a webinar invitation to learn more about the technology is available here:

http://www.clearpathrobotics.com/introducing-otto/.

About Clearpath Robotics

Clearpath Robotics Inc. develops self-driving vehicles for industry. The company provides hardware, software and services to enable self-driving vehicle development, deployment and fleet operation. Clearpath works with over 500 of the world’s most innovative brands in over 40 countries, serving markets that span manufacturing, logistics, mining, agriculture, aerospace and defence. Clearpath is an award-winning company with recent awards, including Robotics Business Review Top 50 Company, Edison Award for Innovation, Business Insider Top 40 under 40, and Canada’s Top 100 Employers. Visit Clearpath Robotics at www.clearpathrobotics.com.

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Matt Rendall nominated for national young entrepreneur award

Matt Rendall, CEO of Clearpath Robotics, will represent Ontario in the national finals for the $100,000 Young Entrepreneur Award sponsored by the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Matt Rendall“It is more validation that we are onto something really powerful,” Rendall said in an interview.

The bank said Clearpath Robotics made it to the finals for its work on autonomous mobile robots that are able to navigate warehouses and factories on their own.

This cutting-edge technology is a new focus within Clearpath that taps into a lucrative market in advanced manufacturing.

Until now, Clearpath has produced autonomous vehicles that can operate on land and water. They collect samples from toxic environments, perform tasks in underground mines and clear explosives.

But the Kitchener company’s latest technology push is all about mobile robots in warehouses and factories.

The Young Entrepreneur Award is open to individuals who are 18 to 35, who faced a turning point or decisive moment in their business, and came up with solution that puts the business on a new growth trajectory. Rendall’s turning point is the plan to develop autonomous mobile robots.

A national committee will evaluate the quality of the finalists’ projects and their evaluation will count for 50 per cent of the final ranking. The winner will be announced June 22. The runner-up receives $25,000 in consulting services.

Clearpath was founded in 2009 by Rendall and three other University of Waterloo mechatronics graduates.

The company, which now employs 80 people, has undergone “a huge transformation” in the last six months because of the program to develop autonomous factory robots, said Rendall.

“We are now working on significant industrial deployments of the technology,” he said.

Conventional materials handling technology in factories and warehouses involves what are known as automated magnetic vehicles or automated magnetic carts. They rely on a magnetic strip buried in the floor to help navigate.

These carts and vehicles cannot operate away from that magnetic field. If there are obstructions on the magnetic strip, such as a garbage can or pallet, the vehicle will not move.

“We are taking the train off the tracks, and allowing it to behave much more like a taxi,” Rendall said. “What that means is you can very efficiently route where a package needs to be from one location in a factory to another location.”

The robots are equipped with high-powered computers and sensors that mimic the eyes of people, letting the robot learn about their environment.

The Business Development Bank noted that developing autonomous robots is a challenging process. Among other things, the company must secure commitments from early adopters who “will help de-risk the process,” it said.

“Getting these prototypes to market will pave the way for the company to create a whole new industrial division and further expand into the manufacturing sector,” the bank said.