Slamcore recently introduced Slamcore Alert, a system that can turn existing forklifts into safety-aware machines. The product alerts forklift drivers to nearby safety threats using visual data and artificial intelligence models.
When Slamcore was founded in 2016, its founders aimed to create a robot “brain” based on visual information. Since Day 1, the company said it has been gathering crucial, rich data for training its AI. Over time, however, the Slamcore realized that strictly building robot brains might not be the best path forward.
“As we were starting to build the brains of a robot using vision, we found that when you go into an industrial warehouse or a factory — while I love robots and they are absolutely the future — they’re still only moving about 5% of goods,” Owen Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of Slamcore, told Automated Warehouse. “When you look at what’s going on on the shop floor, it’s 95% of the goods are being moved by manual vehicles. The king of that entire space is the manual forklift.”
“So there are about 15 million forklifts out there, compared to, if you take Amazon out of the equation, probably only about half a million robots out there,” he continued. “As a company that specializes in the brain, we don’t want to build the entire end-to-end solution, which a lot of companies end up doing. We want to be good at what we do and create this platform so that every machine that moves will ultimately use our brain.”
Forklifts spend up to 55% of their time idling
While Nicholson said he believes that robots will become commonplace in the long term, in the present, robotics was a very uncertain industry. If Slamcore’s customers went out of business, that would put the company in a difficult spot.
“We realized that all of the brains that you have in a robot, there’s a lot of value if you can actually put that into a manual forklift, but not to make it autonomous. This is a really important distinction,” Nicholson said.
There are already many companies working to create completely autonomous forklifts. Instead, Slamcore just wants to make them smarter than they were before.
“There is a huge amount of value in making these vehicles more spatially aware, for too many reasons,” Nicholson said. “The main reason is, if you’re trying to coordinate an entire fleet of vehicles, whether the robots or forklifts, and you don’t know where they are, then good luck.”
According to Nicholson, some facilities spend a lot of time simply tracking down their forklifts across the building, which can reduce productivity. “Something like 55% of the time, manual forklifts are not moving goods, and they’re not being productive,” he noted.
When there are as many as 1,000 forklifts deployed at a site, this downtime adds up quickly. The company released Slamcore Aware, which lets fleet managers know where their forklifts are at any time. Now, it’s tackling the other biggest issue facing forklifts in warehousing: safety.
Safety emerges as a critical concern
On top of the productivity concerns, safety has become crucial in operations as reshoring puts more pressure on U.S. warehouses. Data shows that approximately two people are killed by forklifts in the U.S. every week.
“Safety is becoming more and more important as there’s a lot of reshoring going on,” Nicholson said. “Trying to do more in American sites is great for bringing in a lot of the manufacturing and jobs into the U.S. But it does mean that those sites are getting more chaotic and more crowded.” “
“They’re going higher, they’re going narrower, and they’re just trying to squeeze more in,” he added. “That means there are more interactions between vehicles, robots, and forklifts than there ever have been before. So, there are actually more, very sadly, deaths than there ever have been.”
While Slamcore Aware is for fleet managers, Slamcore Alert is for the forklift drivers themselves, Nicholson explained. It allows Slamcore to give a forklift the “brains of a Roomba,” which enables it to alert the driver if there’s anything in its path.
Nicholson compared this to an ADAS system in cars. These don’t take over driving, but they will nudge the driver away from danger when needed.
“The [forklifts] have all the advanced AI that you would have in a robot, but instead of using that information to control the vehicles, we’re just setting a buzzer off,” Nicholson said.
How to determine the right level of alert
One of the challenging parts of designing a system like Slamcore Alert is determining the right way for the system to interact with human users.
“If you do [set off an alert] too often, and you do it when it’s not actually a danger, very quickly the drivers just ignore it,” Nicholson said. “Or, worse, they shove a screwdriver into the speaker and stop it from making noises, because it’s just completely infuriating.”
“A lot of the older kind of pedestrian detection alert systems that you see have come at it from just a standard computer vision standpoint,” he continued.
For these systems, a camera detects a person within a certain range, and then an alert goes off.
“Because we come at it from more of the robotic space, we’ve got this real perception system,” said Nicholson. “We know where the person is, how far away they are, what speed the forklift is going at, if it’s going towards or away from the person.”
“All of this information can be used, as well as the presence of the person, to figure out, A, is there a risk, and B, should I do a red light with a large buzzer, or just an amber light?” he added.
The AI at the core of Slamcore Alert
At the center of Slamcore Alert is an AI system that can reason about its surroundings. Slamcore has been training this system since the start of the company, giving it an advantage over a new startup that needs to start from scratch.
“We have an absolutely incredible amount of data that we’ve been capturing, and it’s very rich visual data,” Nicholson said.
All of this data comes from stereo cameras deployed in real-world environments, giving Slamcore spatial information about the scene. It also has an inertial sensor, so the team can measure forces on that camera.
“We’ve got about 500 forklifts now running in the wild, doing kilometers and kilometers and kilometers a day,” Nicholson said. “The data we’re capturing is human-driven. So, it’s not just a static camera. It’s not just random images. These are images captured from a vehicle which is being controlled by humans, so there’s a human actually modifying the way in which the camera is moving.”
“We have this incredibly rich data set of 30 sites now that we’re running across the world, and that allows us to train networks in a way that’s very unique to us,” he continued.
Slamcore has evolved its systems as AI has evolved. This means it’s worked with machine learning models, deep learning, and is now looking into the generative AI space.
“We have such a broad breadth [of data] now that we’re pretty much plug and play for any site, and it’s just bulletproof. It works really, really well because we’ve been exposed to so many different types of edge cases and different types of lighting, different types of motion, different types of environments that we’re running around. That’s one of our real unique points. And we’re only just getting started,” Nicholson said.
Slamcore aims to scale to 1,000 sites in 2026
Nicholson said he has ambitious plans for expanding Slamcore. The company’s systems are working at 500 sites now, and it hopes to grow to 1,000 in the next year. It’s scaling by providing value right away for its customers.
“You can’t go to a factory operator and say, ‘Hey, I’d like to put cameras on all your vehicles, because I’m going to do some cool foundation model stuff for you in three or four years.’ They’re switched off the moment you mention the word ‘AI,’ to be honest,” Nicholson said.
“They have KPIs [key performance indicators] they have to hit,” he explained. “That’s what they care about. So what we found is, if I go to them and say, ‘Look, I can make your forklift fleet 10% more efficient, or 20% more efficient, and I can reduce your accidents by 50%,’ they’re interested. They don’t care about the fact that there’s AI that’s running underneath. Quite often, they just want to move more and keep people safe.”
As Slamcore grows and its AI gets better, Nicholson said it will likely come full circle. The company started building robot brains, and as more robots make their way into the warehouse, Nicholson said Slamcore will likely be there to give them enhanced spatial intelligence.
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