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Understanding Autonomous Mobile Robots
Understanding Autonomous Mobile Robots

February 18, 2022

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Multiple industry analysts predict that emerging technologies of mobile robots and autonomous guided vehicles are gaining prominence. They feature in hype cycles, top technology trends, and CXO investment priority lists. Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) are robots that can understand the dynamic environment around them and navigate and/or handle things in the environment in scope.

The market for AMRs is expected to grow at 13.5% CAGR, with certain segments projected to grow multifold within the next 2-3 years. They manifest in multiple forms for diverse industry applications and are being developed by leading industry innovators.

In this blog, we will look at the foundational technologies in every AMR product or solution. AMR as a segment promises to improve enterprise productivity and value chain throughput.

How is the AMR market shaping up?

In the summer of 2020, Gartner reported in its report on Hype Cycle for Drones and Mobile Robots that Autonomous Mobile Robots, widely abbreviated as AMRs, were coming up as new technology. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit on a global scale, leading to sweeping mandates of social distancing in enterprises as well as marketplaces. That entirely changed the outlook towards AMRs.

What was earlier seen as a niche upcoming technology with applications for improving worker productivity, became a necessity to ensure a safe operating environment for workers and customers alike, with applications like patient monitoring, treatment administration, and sanitation in COVID-19 wards in hospitals and nursing homes.

The market for AMRs is expected to grow to about $170B by 2027. However, some specialized applications are expected to grow even faster – Gartner predicts that robotic goods-to-person systems for picking applications in warehouses will grow 4x by 2023. All these observations and market statistics point to AMRs becoming prevalent across the enterprise, commercial, and consumer applications in near future.

What are the types of AMRs?

Now that we see that AMRs will gain widespread adoption, let us look at the types of AMRs and their most prominent applications.

Industrial and warehousing robots are by far the most common types of AMRs. They are used in warehousing applications for retail, logistics, and industrial manufacturing segments. They are further categorized as follows:

  • Merchandise delivery robots: They simply move goods from one point to another on a warehouse or manufacturing shop floor using autonomous navigation technologies. As the next generation of automated guided vehicles, these are gaining rapid adoption for improving supply chain and logistics productivity.
  • Material handling robots: These robots perform item picking and sorting, manage inventory levels, and even perform basic assembly functions. These are not as mobile as the delivery robots but have limited mobility in their work locale. They often have significant dexterity for handling objects of varying form factors, orientations, and shapes.
  • Material processing robots: They perform functions like welding, forging, and painting. They are used commonly on the manufacturing assembly lines. They have limited to no mobility but are still moving robots with significant dexterity for accurately handling complex material profiles (form factor, shape, orientation, and working temperature) during the manufacturing process.

Medical robots are also gaining prominence, particularly in the present times of the COVID-19 pandemic. As in the case of industrial and warehousing robots, they are categorized by applications of varying degrees of mobility and dexterity.

  • Hygiene and sanitation robots perform functions like floor cleaning, disinfection while autonomously navigating from one place to another in hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics.
  • Patient care robots support the caregiving staff in medicine and treatment administration (delivering medicines, collecting body fluid samples, and assisting physical therapies), patient health monitoring, and diagnostics. These have limited mobility around the patient bed and have somewhat dexterity for doing basic healthcare equipment and material handling tasks.
  • Surgery assistance robots are mostly non-navigational but have a high degree of dexterity for extremely accurate and precise functions during surgical and post-surgical procedures that assist surgeons and other medical practitioners.

Consumer robots are used mostly for cleaning various spaces in and around homes like rooms, bathrooms, pools, and lawns. These focus mostly on autonomous navigation. Other applications include pick and place robots that have autonomous navigation as well as dexterous material handling functionalities that assist elderly and unwell patrons.

What are its foundational technologies?

AMR functionality is comprised of three main pillars – environment perception, understanding, and control. Environment perception needs to work accurately in ambient conditions complexities like illumination level (dark, bright), medium (air, water), and number/classes of objects in the sensory field. Different types of sensors (video, audio, or lidar) are used for perception and their inputs are often integrated through sensor fusion. Various computer vision pipelines (line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight) are leveraged in AMRs for the perception function.

Understanding these fused sensor feeds requires pre-processing at the edge, gateway as well as data management, and analysis in the cloud. Streaming data management, diagnostic and predictive analytics are often leveraged for device and end-user applications for insights for asset health and control decisions. Finally, the control of robotic movements, navigational or dexterous, is facilitated through motors, actuators, and hydraulics.

How AMRs make a difference?

At its core, AMRs are used for improving the productivity of the enterprise workforce in commercial and industrial segments. When used effectively in collaboration with skilled workers, AMRs can help streamline enterprise processes, reduce costs and efforts, and significantly improve value chain throughput. By independently managing processes like hygiene and healthcare that require optimal human contact, AMRs deliver meaningful outcomes for at-risk populations, especially in global healthcare emergencies like the prevalent COVID-19 pandemic.

 

About the Author

Nirupam Kulkarni

Nirupam Kulkarni works as Product Manager focused on eInfochips' IoT, AI  product, and solution portfolio. He has more than 12 years of technology experience across IT and analytics consulting, market research, product management, and digital partnerships.

 

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