With more businesses adopting automation technologies designed to operate alongside manually operated vehicles and equipment, the need to orchestrate workflows within a facility has become more challenging. To address this, Sick, a supplier of sensor intelligence technologies, and InOrbit.AI, the supplier of the cloud-based RobOps platform, are collaborating to enhance operational safety and efficiency via the integration of Sick's Tag-Loc System with InOrbit's platform.
The Sick Tag-Loc system consists of fixed antennas and low-cost ultra-wideband tags that can be attached to equipment, inventory or workers' safety gear.
This combination of Sick and InOrbit technologies allows users to manage a range of mobile equipment. For example, in addition to InOrbit's existing support for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and automated guided vehicles (AGVs), users can now track and orchestrate the movement of manually operated vehicles and equipment like forklifts, pallet jacks and carts, allowing for consistent management of all assets.
The integration of Sick’s Tag-Loc with InOrbit’s platform enables support for hybrid fleets combining autonomous, guided and manual vehicles within a single platform. This unlocks congruent real-time analytics across vehicles, as well as the execution of complex workflows in accordance with traffic rules. For instance, a traffic management rule can be set up to give priority at an intersection to a person pushing a cart or driving a forklift, so that any mobile robots will let the person through first.
"For the first time, users can have robots, people, manually operated vehicles and fixed infrastructure like security cameras, automatic doors, chargers and other IoT devices working together through InOrbit's RobOps platform," said Florian Pestoni, CEO and founder of InOrbit. "This is an important step forward in enabling software-defined operations."
