What can a Visual AI-powered RTLS do for your warehouse & manufacturing operations?

Alphasense Tracker: A solution to make all shop floor traffic trackable

The power of managing mixed fleets

The Current State of Warehouse Automation

Within the increasingly competitive domain of factory and warehouse operations, the adoption of automation remains paradoxically low, with only 6% of US warehouses using mobile robots as of today, according to a G2 report.

While automation has made significant strides in recent years, there's still a long way to go. The reality is that several manual workflows cannot be automated with the technology currently available.

Additionally, there is an operational disconnection between manual and automated workflows.

As such, the solution to bridging this gap lies in adopting an Industry 5.0 approach where collaborative technologies are integrated to enhance human-machine interaction.

Visual AI-enabled RTLS

Answering this challenge, Sevensense has developed the Alphasense Tracker, a Visual-AI-powered Real-Time Locating System (RTLS) for manual industrial vehicles.

The Alphasense Tracker is a camera module that can be seamlessly retrofitted onto manually operated industrial vehicles such as forklifts, stackers, and tuggers.

By providing real-time position data over a local Wi-Fi network, the Alphasense Tracker makes any manually operated vehicle visible within a Fleet Management System (FMS), transforming the FMS into a holistic Traffic Management System (TMS).

As a result, all shop floor traffic becomes trackable and quantifiable, unlocking valuable insights into their usage and performance.

Harnessing the Power of Vision

What sets Alphasense Tracker apart from other RTLSs in the market is its infrastructure-free deployment, low setup costs, and availability for retrofitting compared to alternative solutions like ultra-wideband positioning.

This scalability potential and cost-effectiveness make it an attractive option for businesses seeking to modernize their operations without significant investment or disruption.

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Key Product Inisghts

• Output: (x,y) position with up to ±25 cm precision and orientation angle with up to ±4° precision.
• Plug and Play: Retrofittable, vehicle agnostic, infrastructure-free, and cost-effective solution to track assets in warehouse environments, with less than a day of setup time.
• Broad Compatibility: The pose is reported through VDA5050, allowing seamless integration with existing Fleet Management Systems and Warehouse Management Systems. Furthermore, the Alphasense Tracker is compatible with ABB AMR Studio and the Sevensense Visual AI ecosystem for mobile robots.

Applications

• Asset Monitoring: Gaining insights into asset usage, location, traffic patterns, and performance metrics, allows for improved asset management and utilization.
• Operational Efficiency: Real-time position information and insights into vehicle usage and traffic patterns enable more efficient allocation of resources, minimizing traffic congestion and idle time while maximizing productivity.
• Enhanced Safety: Real-time access to position information facilitates collision prevention, warns drivers of potential hazards, and reduces the risk of accidents in busy warehouse environments.
• Streamlined Visual SLAM maps: Ahlpasense Tracker devices can be integrated into Sevensense Visual SLAM maps and can operate along with Visual SLAM-enabled AMRs without the need to maintain multiple maps.

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What can you do with the data collected by Alphasense Tracker?

The position and orientation data collected through the Alphasense Tracker enables diverse and impactful use cases, spanning from traffic insights and fleet intelligence to workflow optimization:

Traffic Insights

• Live view: See all your vehicles and where they are at a glance. Inspect the live traffic in your facilities and gain situational awareness.
• Truck finder: Localize a specific vehicle in your environment, e.g. when it is needed for a certain job or scheduled for service or maintenance.
• Spaghetti diagram: View the routes that manually operated vehicles typically take in your environment. Understand blockages and inefficient routing rules. Analyze the typical mission distance, time, and profile.
• Heatmaps: Compute the traffic density in your environment. Understand where and when congestions occur and how to avoid them (e.g. rerouting traffic to less-used aisles or adjusting infrastructure).
• Incident investigation: Vehicle position data makes it possible to track back traffic incidents that derived into damages to vehicles, infrastructure, or goods.

Fleet Intelligence

• Collision prevention: Mitigate the risk of accidents by warning drivers of potential collisions with autonomous mobile robots. According to OSHA Statistics -in the US alone-, there are 100K forklift accidents a year, resulting in 35K serious injuries and an average cost of 180K per collision, contributing to high repair costs, damaged goods, and costly downtimes.
• Shock registration: Vehicles equipped with accelerometers or bumpers can already detect impacts and collisions. Knowing their precise location could reduce hazards and avoid future accidents.
• Traffic avoidance: Show drivers congested routes and suggest alternatives. Display the live traffic and current heatmap on a tablet in the cabinet.
• Maintenance predictor: Track the velocity profile of a vehicle over time. Anticipate an upcoming maintenance interval before failure or downtime, e.g. by monitoring the typical max speed over time.
• Velocity assessment: Track the average, maximum, and minimum speed of a vehicle during a shift. Know if speed restrictions and guidelines are being followed. Gain insights on stand still and downtimes of your vehicles.

Workflow Optimization

• Layout adaptations: Take action on heatmaps and dynamically re-route the AMRs to reduce congestion and the risk of collisions. View the impact of your actions on updated heatmaps.
• Material tracking: Follow the flow of transported goods. If drivers confirm a pick-up and drop-off of goods (e.g. through bar code scanning), you will know where the goods ended up and never miss a pallet. Feed this information into your ERP or WMS and have full control and traceability over your inventory. Send drivers precisely to the location where a pick-up or drop-off is scheduled.
• Zoning and fencing: Introduce zones with restricted traffic in your fleet management traffic. Drivers can be altered before entering such a zone (e.g. impermissible vehicle height), and robots can be re-routed if the current traffic density in such a zone is high. Vehicles can also be decelerated in certain zones if remote speed control is enabled.

Get in touch and learn more about Alphasense Tracker!

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