Peer Robotics: Bringing Humans in the Loop to help SMEs Automate
Over the last few decades, manufacturing industries have rapidly evolved and adapted new technologies to optimize. While Industry 4.0 and Automation are some of the universal words in every conversation within large-scale manufacturing, the ground reality for small and medium-scale manufacturing across the globe is that things have barely changed. While their automation needs (be it the labor shortage or increasing operational costs) are similar to the ones of large corporations, the high costs and complexity of the current solutions make it extremely difficult for SMEs to adopt these technologies.
Shift from Fixed Automation to Human-Robot Collaboration
For the wide adoption of automation on the shop floors, it’s important to build robots that are natural and intuitive to work with for any regular person on the shop floors. It’s important to build solutions that can take over the repetitive tasks of the job while allowing humans to make cognitive decisions.
Peer Robotics truly believes that the future lies in collaboration between humans and robots rather than fixed automation. They are building material handling solutions that can learn from humans in real-time, allowing people on the shop floor to interact with these robots just like they would interact with a trolley. Humans can simply grab the robot, move it from point A to B, and in this process, teach the robot how to perform the tasks autonomously the next time onwards. This reduces the need for specialized engineers or training, further reducing fixed costs.
Peer Robotics Solution Use-Cases
Peer Robotics focuses on delivering entire end-to-end solutions that users can deploy independently. A couple of such use-cases are:
- Water Spider Solution: Kit movement from storage to production lines
- Trolley Tunneling Solution: Autonomous movement of trolleys on the shop floor
- Kitting Solution: Assisted picking during kitting on the factory floor
- One-Piece Flow Solution: Transition from hauling long lines of trolleys to efficient one-piece movement
Every solution comes integrated with the following hardware & software components:
- Peer Robotics Mobile Robot Base
- Top Module Specific for the Solution
- Long-Range Industrial WiFi Access Point
- Autonomous Docking Station for Charging
- Solution Dashboard (hosted on the robot or external server, depending on the Use-Case)
The solutions are available for the users on either a fixed-cost or subscription-based model, depending on the customer’s preference.
Integration of Hardware, Software, and Human Feedback
Peer Robotics designs and develops its entire product in-house, from its own hardware design to firmware and software stacks.
Partnered with Nividia Inception Program and Intel Partner Alliance, Peer Robotics utilizes computational platforms like Jetson Xavier and Intel NUC for the onboard computation of mapping, path planning, obstacle avoidance, and natural navigation. Along with intel real sense cameras as a key visual navigation component. Peer Robotics also develops its own custom PCB boards like charging modules, IMU boards, central control units, etc.
The entire stack is built on the ROS framework for faster development and easier integration with multiple sensors and drive systems. But the core part of the stack starts with bringing Humans into the loop and building features that allow the robots to learn from humans when it comes to mapping a new environment or natural navigation and path planning.
Peer Robotics also offers open API architecture to enable 3rd party integrations with MES systems as and when necessary.
Partnership with Seeed Studio
With its partnership with Seeed Studio, Peer Robotics will benefit across the board. From collaboration on manufacturing PCB boards to utilizing reServer i5 1135 as a central server for multi-robot deployments. Peer Robotics will also explore its migration to Jetson AGX Orin with support from the Seeed Studio team.
Introducing reServer i5 1135 by Seeed Studio
Features
- Compact design for a server with an overall dimension of 132mm*124mm*233mm
- Powered by the latest 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 CPU running up to 4.20GHz and Intel® Iris Xe Graphics G7 80EUs
- Rich peripherals including dual® 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet ports, USB 3.2 Type-A port, USB 2.0 Type-A port, HDMI port, and DP port
- Support hybrid connectivity including 5G, LoRa, BLE, and WiFi (5G and LoRa need additional modules)
- Dual SATA III 6.0 Gbps data connectors for 3.5”/2.5″ SATA hard disk drives with enough space inside the enclosure to store them both
- M.2 B-Key/ M-Key/ E-Key for expandability such as SSD, LTE/4G/5G, WiFi 6 Modules
- Quiet cooling fan with a large VC heat sink for excellent heat dissipation
- Easy to install, upgrade and maintain with ease of access to the internal components after opening the enclosure
- Pre-installed Windows 10 Enterprise (Unactivated), also supports other Windows OS and Linux OS
Application
- Small office, home office server
- Industrial Automation
- Robotics
- Healthcare
- Smart Agriculture
- NAS
About Peer Robotics
Peer Robotics is a collaborative mobile robotics company building material handling solutions for manufacturing industries. Peer Robotics mobile robots can learn from humans in real-time, allowing people on the shop floor to integrate and deploy the solutions easily.
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