We automate the outside!

Autonomous heavy-duty vehicles for outdoor sites.

Render of the ATLARYS autonomous outdoor forklift

Problem

Robots took the factory floor.
Outside, automation stops.

The messier the environment, the fewer the options. At the same time the physical work outside the hall is getting harder to staff every year.

Approach

Safe and robust is the challenge.

Sites that tried outdoor autonomy did not fail for lack of ambition. The pilots never reached reliable operation — weather, mixed traffic and changing routes, and the problem of getting any of it certified.

01Safe and robustOutdoor systems usually trade one against the other: safe enough to certify, or robust enough to run. We build for both, because a yard needs both.
02A clear certification pathwaySafety is designed in from the start along a defined route to certification, instead of being argued for after the fact.
03Built to adaptA framework for bringing the system to a new site and a new vehicle quickly — without starting the safety case over each time.

The approach grows out of research on safe autonomous driving at the Technical University of Munich, and is validated on TUM's autonomous research vehicle.

Platform

It starts with the forklift.
It does not end there.

Our first application is the outdoor forklift on production sites: work that adds no value, in weather nobody wants, and yet critical to the flow of production. Underneath it sits a modular robotics platform.