Fleet managers in need of flexibility
The mobile robot market is still in an early stage with respect to standard maturity. While VDA 5050 is the strongest standard in Europe and enjoys a foothold in the United States, alternative initiatives have gained traction in other markets. In addition, we already see a behavior common to every healthy standards-driven market: Vendors introduce innovative features going beyond the current standard scope in order to satisfy customer needs. The standard evolves accordingly and increases the scope to cover even more use cases over time. For these reasons, it is natural that fleet manager vendors take a flexible stance and do not limit themselves to exactly one approach.
We at SYNAOS are looking at other existing standards and commonly used interfaces as well to compensate for the current lack of market penetration by the VDA 5050. This approach gives our customers the freedom to choose their mobile robots freely. For our customers to benefit at an early stage of their partnership journey with us (and to minimize potential entry barriers), we also offer to build custom interfaces for them. This can also serve as an interim solution until their need warrants committing to VDA 5050. While we are committed to contributing to the ongoing development of the VDA 5050, we also recognize the need to find custom solutions for clients and their preferred hardware vendors who have not adopted any standard yet.
"Our vision is to enable customers achieve outstanding operational excellence through interoperability. VDA 5050 is a fundamentally important tool for that. As such, we are fully committed to contributing to its ongoing development and dissemination."
- Dr. Lennart Bochmann | CPO & Co-Founder SYNAOS
Challenge: Finding middle ground between orchestrating all assets while keeping unique features of mobile robots
From a warehouse or factory operator’s perspective, it almost seems to come down to dogma: Go for a centralized or a decentralized intelligence and control? And as can be expected: It is a great challenge – to say the least – to get the best of both worlds. Everything in production is designed for maximum cycle time and process stability. Traffic management, route optimization, and process reliability are greatly impacted if there are multiple AMRs scooting around as independent actors guided by their algorithms, each calculating the best possible route in real-time, which turns them into unpredictable traffic participants.
Manufacturers will need to keep in mind that some industrial setups are better suited to AGVs and other conventional solutions rather than AMRs. The higher investments required for deploying AMRs are not always justified, particularly for standardized transport processes that don't require much flexibility. Additionally, AMRs' autonomous routing and unplanned stops can cause issues in production environments that prioritize stability and predictable throughput times.
Our vision for the SYNAOS Intralogistics Management Platform is to help our customers achieve operational excellence by orchestrating all shop floor assets and transport units. Great strides have been made regarding the standardization of AGVs. Leveraging the advantages of a central traffic management solution without losing the benefits of AMRs, remains worthy of further investigation so that customers aren’t locked into vendor-specific scenarios.
