Swarm Intelligence (SI) and bio-inspired computing have attracted great interest in almost every area of science and engineering, including robotics, over the last two decades. AGILOX has built a system on SI that features unit to unit communication for the benefit of the greater whole.
AGILOX directs most of its effort into developing decentralized autonomy. AGILOX Intelligent Guided Vehicles (IGVs) are completely independent, self-controlled, and intelligently designed to handle failover, recovery, and deadlock prevention onboard each IGV.
As a result, the system can provide real-time solutions to complex optimization problems in the most efficient way possible. The swarm can also handle unexpected changes in dynamic environments without any human intervention.
AGILOX vehicles automatically exchange information about the environment and the current work order situation with each other via WiFi several times per second. Based on virtual transport costs, which each participant constantly recalculates for all pending orders, it is automatically decided which vehicle fulfills an order and which path that vehicle can take to fulfill this order in the shortest amount of time.
All of this is possible with almost no overhead cost to the end-customer. There are no expensive server systems, no wires added under the floor, no reflector or beacon installations – no hardware of any kind, other than your regular 2.4 or 5 GHz WiFi network and the charger. There is no software to install or maintain, no version numbers to keep up with, and no licenses with ongoing subscription fees.
Agilox Swarm Diagram (image courtesy of Agilox)
The nature of the AGILOX Swarm Intelligence also provides another massive advantage in terms of setup cost. Once the first AGILOX unit learns its environment and workflow details, the system becomes immediately infinitely scalable. Adding additional vehicles to the swarm to increase throughput is as simple as turning on the power and assigning an IP address. Within minutes, the new vehicle will automatically download all of its configuration information from the swarm and begin working, no additional commissioning or programming required.
The AGILOX solution is unique on the marketplace as they are one of the early solution providers to commercialize and deploy swarm based intelligence based systems. While furher research on swarm intelligence continues in university labs, AGILOX is pushing the boundaries and running their solution in production everyday.
For further information, please check out AGILOX Systems.
