February 6, 2019
The landscape of robotics business applications is evolving. Robots are being called upon to handle a broader variety of tasks. They are expanding beyond roles as stationary workhorses in areas such as manufacturing to become mobile machines that address a wider array of challenging automation duties. Robots increasingly operate autonomously and their abilities to traverse changing and unstructured environments are improving.
“Lidar technology is an essential ingredient in robotic autonomy and navigation. It allows mobile robots to extend outside controlled situations with pre-defined tasks and function in unfamiliar and unpredictable settings,” said Frank Bertini, UAV and Robotics Business Manager at Velodyne Lidar. “Lidar sensors provide a constant stream of high-resolution, 3D information about the robot’s surroundings, including locating the position of objects and people.”
Lidar enables the robot to not only identify the presence of an entity but also determine in real time if it is a human or object. This allows the robot to assess appropriate risk behavior models, which is essential for managing safety in robot-human collaboration. Also, lidar, which does not recognize the identity of a person, avoids the privacy problems created by robots that use cameras as a sensing technology – an important factor in retail and other applications.
Mobile robots operating outside can rely on geolocation capabilities, such as GPS along with sensing technologies including lidar, to determine where they are located and where they are headed. That is not typically possible indoors. Mobile robots operating indoors employ simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology that utilizes lidar’s data to build a map of the robot’s environment and locate the robot within that map. The benefits provided by SLAM technology include “easy navigation without reliance on external technologies and real-time formation of 3D maps with reduced cost and power requirements,” according to Global Market Insights.
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