Innovations in Industrial Robotics
Industrial robots have been streamlining the workflow in manufacturing facilities for decades and now recent innovations are carrying on this legacy of expediting factory processes.
OTTO Motors of Kitchener, Ontario Canada is contributing to such innovation with their fleets of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), which are not to be confused with Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). What’s the difference? Cutting-edge technology utilized by the AMRs allow these machines to learn and make decisions as they encounter new situations thanks to their onboard perception and navigation software.
With this onboard technology, OTTO Motors’ AMRs have taken burdensome materials handling tasks away from manual operators by utilizing robotic delivery routes. This frees up human workers to focus on more important tasks while maximizing facility productivity.
What exactly do OTTO’s AMRs do? Their Autonomous Mobile Robots transport materials and pallets to and from different operators, automation equipment, and storage racks, which allows skilled labourers to maintain their positions at their workstations without ceasing production processes.
OTTO’s AMRs improve safety by limiting human transport tasks, while also reducing labour costs while increasing throughput on a consistent and reliable basis. OTTO Motors have produced an AMR for all of the common jobs found on the shop floor, and they’ve been proven to reduce material handling costs by up to 90% – and that’s significant.
With IoT solutions, managing a fleet of AMRs in a factory setting is intuitive and focused on maximizing ROI. From a single dashboard, managers can view vehicle status, tasks currently in progress, historical trends, and more. By utilizing flexible application programming interfaces (APIs), OTTO’s fleet manager can be easily connected to pre-existing factory systems and tools like enterprise resource planning systems or warehouse management systems which provide visibility to inventory, supply chain management, accounting, project management, and more. By connecting to these systems, IoT-enabled AMRs can connect to conveyor and shelving devices as well as robots to ensure seamless materials handling.
This sort of innovative IoT application in the warehousing industry is what allows manufacturers to stay ahead of the competition. By tackling common industry problems like labour shortage issues and reducing costs through optimization, the adoption of technology and innovative solutions in industrial settings is what allows manufacturers to scale their business and find success in the modern market.
IoT innovations are not limited to the warehousing and logistics industry, however. The cutting-edge and modern approach that OTTO Motors brings to the industrial world exists as a possibility in all industries, and we will certainly see increasingly more examples of IoT innovations across sectors as we move into the future.
To learn more about how IoT solutions and industrial robotics can transform your production facility, or how IoT innovations might apply to your industry, contact us at Evolution Data.
Robotics for automation is very common use case in manufacturing. The first industrial robot was used by GM as far back as 1961, for spot welding applications and by 1970 the revolution was well underway cross the sector. Today, smart robotics are all the rage and in our latest Blog post we talk about one that we admire. Based in Canada too. #robot #automation #IOT #smartmanufacturing #innovation #automotive #cars #factory #IIOT
