A recent report by ABI predicts 4,000,000 robots will be deployed in 50,000 warehouses by 2025.
This means the next decade will be spent shipping and deploying robots at scales never before seen. Robots will stop being deployed in bespoke one-off integrations and start being deployed in fleets and managed remotely.
Robots need to be tended to in a more scalable way than one off fixes and on-site support. Late night flights for robotics engineers don’t scale.
Freedom Robotics has built the tools to enable this future. With the release of our Pilot feature, we enable teleoperation, mission management, remote mapping, and configuration from anywhere in the world on any material handling robot, like a MiR. This enables out of the box capabilities for logistics applications. Additionally, if you have separate PLCs or different autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) from different manufacturers, you can interact with all of them using a single interface.
How Freedom Pilot Works
Drop in an industrial quality compute, like an OnLogic or a B&R Automation PC 3100, or with ethernet and the Freedom Agent installed, point it at the robot IP and port on the MiR, and you are ready to start operating, managing, and debugging your material handling robots remotely in under 10 minutes.
MiR builds and manufactures a number of production-ready robots for use in materials handling applications. Freedom Robotics enables remote deployment, monitoring, alerting and teloperation of these robots.
Freedom Pilot: Your Virtual Eyes and Ears
With the Freedom platform, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have easy access to stable tools for operators, integrators, developers, and managers. The system is built on a global scalable infrastructure which allows you to efficiently manage robots from anywhere - whether it is an integrator with a laptop on the shop floor (OR their cellphone in an emergency), a shop manager towing a robot with a dead battery back to a charger after being notified or a full robot operations center (ROC) with built in dashboards and a global response team.
With the Pilot interface, you can send commands to activate, drive or return the robot to a safe state, view key metrics to monitor the robot, and receive real-time alerts on its battery state, mission status and more.
The Freedom Pilot interface allows you to send one-off navigation goals and refine them, then confirm and send them to the robot, save them for later, add them to a mission queue remotely from anywhere in the world, and easily share them with your team.
We designed Freedom Pilot with our customers in mind (and with a huge amount of feedback from the initial fleets that deployed Pilot in beta over the last year). One thing we have learned is that each type of user interacts with materials handling robots differently. Here are some of the key uses and benefits of Pilot to each of Freedom’s core users.
The Robot Wrangler - Operators
Operators and technicians need to keep everything running smoothly. In the words of one of the plant engineers for a manufacturing customer who runs Freedom, “Nothing is more frustrating than a robot doing something unexpected and having no way to fix it.” With Freedom Pilot, he is notified of faults in real time. If he receives a notification that the robot has stopped when it should be moving, he can log in from anywhere, view the camera feeds, lidar, logs and diagnostics coming off the robot, and command the robot to move on to a different dropoff or pick up point to return to its mission.
Key operator tasks enabled by Freedom include:
- Key Metric Dashboard - Battery percent, charging status, progress to goal
- Custom Command Injection - Named static JSON payloads on topics or callbacks like unlock, dock, pause, play, brew coffee, pick a part or try again
- Realtime 3d Environment - Transformation trees, occupancy grids, static and dynamic costmaps, lidar, planned paths, odometry
- Relocalize - Send a new pose to a lost robot, operators visually match a real time lidar scan to the map
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The Robot Manager - Process & Plant engineers
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They can then share a link with an integrator or vendor providing a full-stack robot replay of the moment the robot became mislocalized. This entire interaction is logged in the system for any future audits.
Key robot manager tasks enabled by Freedom include:
- Mission Management- Clear queues, add new missions, start & pause the queue, switch loops from anywhere, add docking stations
- Route Creation and Saving - Create and save routes with multiple stops along the way
- Navigation Goals - Send and save navigation goals
- Battery Management - Identify battery curves, charging profiles, tune battery charging behavior and add charging stops
- Relocalize - Send a new pose to a lost robot, operators visually match a real time lidar scan to the map
The Robot Integrators & Vendors
In a previous life, I worked as an integrator for manufacturing equipment in aerospace, packaging and logistics applications - there is a certain kind of chaos that ensues when you get a call from a plant operator just after deployment telling “it stopped working.”
As an Integrator I was always looking to avoid a last-minute flight to figure out what “it” is and why it happened. Freedom Robotics gives the ability to remotely map, set up missions, send commands, and view full-stack logs when things go wrong. Communication is increased from “It broke - seems to be stopped” to “Here is the link to the Robot Replay - see if you can reproduce it and let me know when you’re done fixing it remotely.”
Key integrator and vendor tasks enabled by Freedom include:
- Map Remotely - Launch mapping scripts and teleop the robot in new environments to create maps
- Mission Management - Clear queue, queue up new missions, start & pause the queue, switch loops from anywhere, add docking stations
- Robot Replay - Shareable dashboards to any point in time with full stack replay
Having the Right Tools Lets You Ship Quickly and Increase Uptime
Freedom lets you have standard, scalable and mature tools for building, deploying and managing your AMRs. We have seen customers have extremely significant increases in uptime, quality and issue identification in the first week of deploying simply by being able to see, respond to and resolve issues in real-time and where the data is available to the right people in the right ways.
Try it out today
Our system can work on any logistics platform. Check out our documentation for more information on Pilot features. Or get going today by emailing us at hello@freedomrobotics.ai, signing up for a free trial, or ping us on chat!
