Motion Planning and Related Algorithms Applied to Real Problems
The point of this section is for our community to brag about
the successes of our algorithms in industrial applications.
This information is particularly valuable to include in research proposals to indicate the successes of the past as leverage for investing in our community for future efforts.
Kineo CAM : a success story of motion planning algorithms
Kineo Computed Aided Motion is a start-up company that develops and markets advanced software solutions for automatic path planning in industrial domains such as product lifecycle management. This technology, resulting from the recent progress of the motion planning research and now incorporated by major providers of PML solutions (UGS-Technomatix, Dassault Systèmes), demonstrates ability of the algorithms to explore complex industrial scenarios and cost-saving through faster
computations (up to 50% time reduction).
For more details on Kineo's story, see
article in the June 2006 issue of the IEEE RA Magazine.
KIVA Systems : Defying the Laws of Fulfillment
The Kiva warehouse management system by KIVA Systems is the first commercially available, large-scale autonomous robot system. The Kiva system uses hundreds of inexpensive robots capable of lifting and carrying inventory pods to bring the products to stations where workers can pick items off the pods and hence increases the productivity by a factor of two or more. The first permanent installation was deployed in the summer of 2006.
The Kiva system is a multi-agent system, where a Job Manager (JM) allocates system-wide resource (i.e., pods, robots, stations) and each robot handles its own task planning, path planning (using a standard implementation of A*), and motion planning. Observe that all robots operate in a controlled, known environment and they are essentially independent (i.e., no collaboration between robots).
The Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre (FCC)
The motion planning software developed by the Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre (FCC) is used at the Volvo Cars plant in Sweden. One of the problems the planner solved for Volvo cars and others is the sealing problem (i.e., using robots to spray a sticky substance along the seams of a car body).