AMR BenefitsYour workers and customers will also miss out on the benefits AMRs offer them. And what are those benefits? Consider the results of a recent double-blind Warehousing Vision Study, recently commissioned by Zebra Technologies. In that study, 83% of warehouse associates who work alongside AMRs today claim the autonomous robots have helped increase their productivity and reduce walking/travel time a win-win for you and your front-line teams. Whats more, three-quarters of associates say AMRs have helped reduce errors, which is good for you and your customers, while nearly two-thirds (65%) credit AMRs with career advancement opportunities, which helps with employee retention.

So, it is critical we eliminate the biases that result from a me, myself and I mindset or preconceived notions. We must ensure neither AMRs nor human workers fall victim to sole agent syndrome. The best way to do that is to put our heads (together) in the cloud.

New Techniques for Teaching TrustworthinessFor as long as I can remember, robotics automation innovation has been driven by three things repeatability, scalability and increased throughput. Thats why many robotic arms, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and static robots have been built to complete tasks within enclosed work cells, along conveyor lines or in travel lanes.

It is also why most robots are programmed to complete tasks using pre-defined motions, with behaviors fully controlled by a person. Most robots do not need to figure things out. They just need to do what a person tells them to do.

AMRs are different, however. While they collaborate and interact with people, they are reliant on a person guiding their every move telling them when to stop, start or move in a different direction. They must be able to make both decisions and the right moves, on their own, without a person intervening.

Behaving Like PeopleAt Zebra Technologies, we use customer scenarios, simulation, and the cloud to understand current AMR behaviors, as well as the changes needed to achieve desired behaviors. We then develop navigation behaviors for the robots, which are based on heuristics/biases that we encode into their navigation and planning code.

These heuristics/biases help AMRs behave more like people socially. For example, robots will drive down the right side of hallways in the United States and the left side of hallways in Great Britain because those are the social norms in those countries. By encoding these behaviors into AMRs navigation and planning, associates have a better understanding of how the robots will behave as they drive around the facility, which results in trust, better collaboration and improved robot performance.

Because our AMRs are managed via the cloud, it is also easy to record data that helps us understand each robots performance in the facility. We use velocity and path conformance for low frequency and high frequency interactions as a baseline to understand how changes to the navigation code improve performance. This allows us to create a vibrant diagram of how each robot performed in different facilities and then make refinements. Using these techniques, we have been able to measure as much as a 54% improvement in robot velocity as it moves through the facility with improved robot social behaviors.

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Look to the Cloud to Improve Human-Robot Social Understanding & Behavior - Robotics Business Review