Locus Robotics Ideas Portal
If a Vector or Max could "flip ends" and decide that its back is now its front and its front is now its back, then instead of turning around, the robot could go back the way it came, when it needed to reroute in a narrow aisle.
This would turn many one way aisles into two way aisles and that would cause much more favorable numbers to come out of our warehouse design calculators.
It would solve lots of congestion problems.
One way to do this would be to enable fully holonomic navigation, but that has some drawbacks.
As an alternative to going fully holonomic, redefining what "front" means could allow us to continue to realize the benefits of the robot behaviours that we have now (for good reasons) but also get the benefits of not having to turn in place in narrow situations.
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Problem/opportunity trying to be solved
rectangular robots require wide aisles if they have to turn around |
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Quantify the problem/opportunity
customers that use vector or max |
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What is the root cause of the problem/opportunity
robots do their path planning based on the length of the hypotenuse of their footprint, which can be large if there's a cart on Vector or if it's a Max robot. This is because they have to be able to turn around and the diagonal measurment of the rectangular footprint (plus padding, plus safety fields, plus costmap inflation) is the distance required to turn around. |
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| Customer need date | Sep 30, 2022 |
| Urgent request | No |
| Report Tag | Deployment |
