MARS Mobile Autonomous Robot for Safe sorting (dual-safety mode: safe mode in a human environment / full speed in a non-human environment)

For small postal and e-commerce applications, the Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) dedicated to sorting applications allow increased flexibility and scale-up of logistic sorting centers.

Today there are two solutions on the market: 1) Collaborative sorting robots, running at low speed in the same areas as humans and allowing workers to load and pick objects from the robots; this solution is more flexible but offers lower performance. 2) Non-collaborative robots, running at high speed in restricted areas; these allow for greater performance but require a cage that limits wharehouse space utilization (eg. actual Fives GENI-Ant robots). This project aims at developing a new smart mobile robot, able to switch between the two modes.The new Dual-Safety Sorting Robots will offer the best of the two worlds by being totally safe to people while using high travelling speed in restricted areas to optimize the process efficiency.

Partners

• BIBA
• Fives
• Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation
• University of Patras
• SICK