Earlier this year, Kevin Dumas, the vice president of product at Mobile Industrial Robots A/S, or MiR, became the company’s new president. Dumas brings 13 years of experience at MiR to the role, and he recently shared his thoughts on the latest mobile robot deployment trends with Automated Warehouse.
Odense, Denmark-based MiR plans to keep its eye on a number of emerging industries in the coming years, according to Dumas.
“Our most established industries so far have been automotive, electronics, some logistics, warehouse, and general manufacturing,” he said. “We’re doing great in those, and maturity is increasing.”
Healthcare, particularly logistics within hospitals, presents another big opportunity, noted Dumas. He also sees potential in semiconductors, aerospace, and defense. In the longer term, MiR is interested in cleanroom-level food and pharmaceutical applications, which require specific product design elements.
MiR develops and manufactures autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to automate internal logistics and optimize material handling for a wide range of payloads, including pallets. The unit of testing equipment maker Teradyne Inc. said it integrates robotics and artificial intelligence to serve businesses of all sizes.
Customer expectations are still mixed
Dumas said he still encounters a spectrum of expectations from customers.
“We still have some customers who are learning things that others learned five years ago,” Dumas said.
This sentiment was echoed by Jake Heldenberg, the director of sales engineering in warehousing for North America at Vanderlande. The market is still hesitant to adopt robotics, which is natural for any new technology, he observed.
president of MiR /
Source: MiR
“As more and more of our customers, and the market, have started to leverage AMRs to support their solutions and their needs, some of that fear is beginning to subside,” Heldenberg said. “The more rational response is looking at the numbers, looking at the benefits, and really assessing it against other technologies that solve the same problem or the same challenge.”
“The biggest change we’re seeing that is going to help accelerate the AMR market is that these big global national companies are now really taking it seriously. They’re investing in it,” Dumas said. “They’re investing in dedicated headcount to accelerate deployment and adoption globally.”
This change has only really emerged within the past five years. Until very recently, most AMR deployments were very bespoke and driven by individual plant managers.
Large companies start to scale AMR fleets
Now, the combination of seeing AMR deployments producing real return on investment (ROI) and continued labor shortages have pushed large companies into taking the plunge, said Dumas. With bigger deployments come higher stakes, more complicated orchestration, and raised expectations, he added.
“With more complex deployments, high reliability becomes more and more important and harder and harder to achieve,” Dumas said. “We’ve spent most of our time just being very close to our end customers. We’ve centralized our applications and solutions teams to really build on best practices and shorten the learning curve on the deployment side.”
Meeting these high expectations has also required MiR to make some changes on the product side.
“We’ve released a new fleet manager that can scale to many more robots than the earlier versions,” Dumas said. “We’ve also done a lot just on how our robots can integrate into third-party systems. And, we’ve really lowered the barrier and improved the ease of use to connect our robots to existing infrastructure.”
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Deployment challenges persist
Over the past few years, AMRs have become easier to deploy, smarter, and more capable. However, Dumas said that customers still often have unrealistic expectations for deployments.
“There are some expectations that AMRs can achieve the stability of a fixed automation cell. No matter how much you try to configure an AMR deployment to be adaptable to dynamic situations, nobody’s quite gotten there yet, where you can be truly hands-off on an AMR deployment for a long period of time,” Dumas explained. “There’s always a little bit of maintenance and a little bit of improvement, because there are so many dynamic variables that it has to deal with.”
To address these challenges, MiR has worked to be better at identifying which parts of the environment it can control and what things it simply needs to work around. In addition, it has collaborated extensively with customers to help them understand what AMRs can and can’t do.
“Getting customers to be in the boat with us, and to look at AMR deployments as holistic,” Dumas said. “It’s not just ‘Drop it in’ and expect it’ll run without any adjustment to workflows and processes.”
MiR president bullish on emerging technology
Generally, MiR is interested in emerging technologies that can improve autonomy and adaptability in really dynamic environmental conditions. In particular, MiR is interested in driving more robot agility while maintaining safety.
When it comes to AI, Dumas said MiR has started incorporating AI into its perception systems first.
“We’ve really started in the world of perception, by using AI to better perceive the sensor inputs to the robot,” Dumas said. “This makes the robots themselves more accurate and better at making decisions. That’s kind of the beginning of our journey into AI at MiR.”
MiR started incorporating AI into its perception systems when it was developing its autonomous pallet jack.
“We were listening to the challenges our customers have with similar products in the market, and trying to figure out how to best solve those problems,” Dumas said. “We heard about a lot of broken pallets, a lot of shrink wrap around pallets, and a lot of quirky environmental conditions that traditional methods, either using basic lidar patterns or even relying on positional sensors, weren’t reliably handling.”
MiR is also interested in technology that promotes sustainability. In large deployments, where many AMRs are deployed charging stations can start to eat up significant amounts of the facility’s total electricity usage, Dumas said. Extending battery life, therefore, becomes crucial.
Regulations are a ‘trust accelerator,’ says MiR
As any technology becomes more prevalent, regulators begin to take notice. MiR is heavily involved in standards committees, Dumas said. This allows it to help regulators strike the right balance between guaranteeing safe operations without over-burdening manufacturers or hurting ROI.
“We’ve always viewed regulations as, when it’s done right, a trust accelerator. It’s helping the whole industry mature faster,” Dumas said. “We’re all in on the need for it and the importance of manufacturers and customers working together to get it right.”
MiR has also invested more in cybersecurity in recent years. This is an increasingly important issue, especially with the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act coming into effect last November.
“MiR has really ramped up its game in terms of the cybersecurity of our software platforms. We’ve done a major relaunch of our fleet software to be able to match best-in-class cybersecurity standards,” Dumas said.
“It’s a really important and probably underserved area of AMRs,” he continued. “There aren’t a lot of AMR companies that are investing heavily in the cybersecurity of their solutions. Over the next two to three years, that’s going to become a big issue.”
