Accelerating Autonomous Mobile Robot Development from the Ground Up
, Associate Director, eInfochips
, Associate Director, eInfochips
The use of robots, and specifically application-specific autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) — most of them with unique functionality and specifications — will soon be ubiquitous. This necessitates creating almost near-product-like minimum viable products to get customer and venture capital attention at speed and scale. We present grounds-up development of AMR and showcase the accelerated development using AGX Orin and tools like ISAAC SIM, Replicator, Omniverse, TAO toolkit/Tensor RT, ROS GEMS, and Triton. This work involves integration and development of multiple technologies, such as VSLAM, sensor fusion, navigation, chassis and hardware design, simulation, sensor integration on ROS2, and automated testing. We achieved all of this in a short time, including the team ramp-up. This fundamental AMR template (i.e., the ability to navigate from point A to point B autonomously while performing object identification and avoiding obstacles) opens opportunities for customizing it for multiple applications and use cases in the future.