Enter a manufacturing facility today and you will find workers alongside industrial machines or robots that take a supporting role processing and assembling products. Futurists envision a different workplace where robots take the lead and workers pursue more personally fulfilling work.
Machine ascendancy has accelerated thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Take Japanese auto parts manufacturer Musashi Seimitsu, which teamed up with SixAI to create visual control robots that catch defects in parts that could put consumers at risk and cause costly recalls for carmakers. The growing success of these robots in Toyota plants, where they fulfill the menial jobs humans previously performed, led to an agreement with a large American automaker.
Recently, SixAI announced the global deployment of Maestro, an advanced AI-enabled autonomous mobile robot (AMR) management platform. Over the next few years, 200 AMRs will work under the direction of Maestro in Musashi factories.
Maestro features a control tower that provides a bird’s eye view of the manufacturing floor and a centrally powered processing unit that directs the AMR fleet. This approach to managing the floor allows for the redistribution of human workers to more value-added roles, while strengthening the supply chain. Musashi’s facilities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are considered for early distribution of Maestro and its AMRs.
At the heart of Maestro is proprietary computer vision and deep learning algorithms that integrate oriented-bounding-box (OBB) technics with dynamic and ongoing generation of depth maps to convert 2D videos into 3D models. This innovative architecture allows for spatial view, location intelligence, and situational awareness of the entire mobility on the floor.
Maestro’s sophistication also makes the system more affordable than current market alternatives. It allows us to strip the AMRs of expensive components such as navigation cameras, laser measuring lidar, and computing power.
The Maestro system is also designed to be safer. AMRs typically rely on two layers of safety, immediate (bumpers, emergency buttons, etc.) and peripheral through 2D lidar. Maestro introduces a third layer of safety that detects objects not within the robot’s line of sight. For example, an AMR exiting an aisle in the warehouse cannot see a person crossing the main path, but Maestro can and alerts the AMR as needed. Maestro also sends a continuous top-view map along with alerts on blockages and obstructions on the floor, allowing AMRs to travel more efficiently.
Maestro enables a new world for generating tasks. While all other AMRs depend on interfaces and application programming interfaces between their fleet manager and factory legacy systems, Maestro processes a QR code tag on a pallet and generates a pallet transfer task to an AMR. Maestro also assigns tasks by placing a pallet in a designated area.
SixAI provides solutions to streamline production and distribution to benefit humanity. By adopting SixAI robots, manufacturers can focus their resources on identifying the business outcomes they wish to achieve through their human workforce and what aspects of their operations they wish to automate.
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