Autonomous vehicles for factory floor being developed by Colorado company

Canvas Technology, a team of engineers withrobotics experience from Google, Toyota, and Kiva Systems (Now Amazon Robotics), is developing technology to put autonomous vehiclesinto factoriesand warehouses for purposes of material handling.

The company has yet to reveal the product to the public, but is already demonstrating the autonomous driving and goods delivery capabilities indoors, according to Robotics Business Review (RBR).

"We started inside factories and warehouses because there is significant demand for a better system, and it’s an easier problem to solve first," said Jonathan McQueen, CEO of Canvas Technology in the RBR article. "The experience we gain indoors will pave the way for a successful launch of outdoor transportation, which our technology also enables."

Much like autonomous vehicles that are on streets, the vehicles being developed by Canvas Technology require multi-component vision systems that can provide navigation, obstacle avoidance, and so on. As a result, Canvas Technology has developed its own proprietary camera solution that, when paired with computer vision algorithms, can enable the systems to move autonomously, but in a safe, accurate, and flexible manner.

"We’ve developed state-of-the-art cameras to drive vision-based autonomy because it’s the best solution at the moment," McQueen said. "But we can incorporate the best sensor technologies over time. If dense 3D lidars come down in cost, size, and power consumption, we can incorporate them."

(Editor’s note: Research and development: Single-chip LIDAR sensor developed by MIT and DARPA)

Canvas it also utilizing SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) techniques and cameras that are continuously mapping, in order to constantly watch the environment, sense when something has changed, and act accordingly, according to RBR.

The company’s technology is reportedly operating in pilots and will launch commercially soon. While many of the headlines out there today involving autonomous vehicles pertain to cars on the road or drones in the sky, the technology can be applied in an array of different applications, with the factory floor being one of them.

View more details in the RBR article.
View the Canvas Technology site.

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