Autonomous Mobile Robots

Robots Moving to Their Own Beat

- By Curtis Franklin, Editor-In-Chief

If robots are going to be useful in the human world, they must detect, analyze, and respond to all the things happening in that world. Advances in edge computing, artificial intelligence, and human-machine interfaces are making robots more useful in more places than ever before.

It's 2025. There were supposed to be robots. You know, Robbie from "Forbidden Planet"—and Rosie from "The Jetsons"—robots that did our chores, mopped out floors, and busted out chops in a playful way when we got out of line. There were supposed to be robots.

We don't have robots like that (grumble) but we do have robots-a-plenty in 2025. Specifically, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) are being used in industry, agriculture, and transportation in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when more entertaining robots were hitting the screen.

BUSY ROBOTS

Rather than being sprinkled evenly across our households and businesses, robots are finding homes in specific applications. Amazon, for example, has deployed more than a million robots working away in its warehouses, a number that nearly matches the humans working in those same locations. The array of robots shown in Figure 1 work together and with their human counterparts to pick and pack items from kites to kayaks to kangaroo feed for delivery in mere hours to customers around the globe.

Before items can be warehoused by Amazon, they must be produced or, in the case of agricultural products, harvested.

That's what robots from 4AG Robotics do, autonomously picking mushrooms without the need for human helpers. These autonomous mushroom pickers, like those in Figure 2, move along the growing beds using AI to determine which mushrooms to gently pluck from a bed of mushroom matrix to pack away for sale.

ROBOTS ON THE MOVE