BUILDING A STRONG AND SAFE BRIGDE, TOGETHER
Our CTO Jose Luis Peralta participated in the Autonomous Off-Highway Machinery Technology Summit in Berlin a few weeks ago. See details here. The summit was a true success. The two-day event was not only packed with great presentations from industry and the academia, but also included some lively and interactive panel sessions giving the audience plenty of opportunities to get to the bottom of the real stuff, as they say. Jose’s presentation was titled as “Roadmap from Research to Commercialization of Autonomous Off-Highway Machinery” and it was very much based on our own experiences with our diverse clientele base consisting of not only small and mid-sized companies but some working machine manufacturer giants.
TECHNOLOGY IS OUR FRIEND
The presentation outlined, on a generic level, how GIM Robotics has navigated through diverse requirements set by different machines, use cases, economical situations, evolving regulatory framework, and whatnot else. Jose provided insights into the importance of the technological development and underlined the need to use, benchmark and overall being aware of the latest advances related to, all relevant sensors, CPUs, middleware solutions and other components from the full stack, so that when the Operational Design Domain definition process with the client (and in some cases with the end-users) would be in full speed, GIM Robotics could always say, with 100% confidence, what kind of combination of the above components would be needed to fulfill, often conflicting, requirements in an optimal way.
CROSSING THE CHASM IS PAINFUL
Jose used Geoffrey Moore’s famous “Crossing the Chasm” concept from the early 1990’s as illustration to present the difficulties of successfully commercializing new autonomous technologies for mobile machines, and how the adoption of technology in this field follows the same curve. Actually, we should say that he focused on telling how difficult it is to build a sturdy enough bridge to cross that gap. When companies want to move their new machines (or subsystems) from the Design and Development phase filled with Proof-of-Concepts, Pilots and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) into real Production phases with stable stream of releases, which are supported with solid service, maintenance, update and safety & regulation compliance related processes, big portion of those companies will either fail miserably, and are forced to ditch the product, or in some sad cases some might even be forced out of business as a result.
WE HAVE WHAT IT TAKES
Our CTO concluded his presentation by underlining the importance of us having a well-balanced portfolio of mature and robust in-house algorithms, to support our client’s journey towards productization. Especially for the perception side of the machine’s software stack, that would enable progressive driving assistance development towards full autonomous products. The integration of those solutions will enable basic but very important capabilities for off-road mobile machines, like precise 6D localization, environmental modelling with different types of maps, and situational awareness capabilities, in all-weather conditions, everywhere – even in GNSS-challenged or even -denied environments.
SHOWING SOME OF OUR REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES
No presentation in this business is worth the paper or the energy used for the preparation, unless you can show some real examples, or in this case, real-world use cases. Jose wrapped his presentation up by showing some of our recent results from different domains, including logistics, light railways, agriculture, and environmental maintenance use cases and then summarizing the most valuable lessons learnt from them.
WANT TO MEET JOSE AT EUROPEAN ROBOTICS FORUM NEXT WEEK?
If you missed the event and would like to hear more about it or book a meeting with him to talk about some future cooperation, we are happy to inform you all that our CTO, aka the “GIMTech missionary man” Dr. Jose Luis Peralta will participate in the 10th European Robotics Forum in Odense, Denmark already next week (14-16 March 2023). To organize a meeting with him there (or later) just go to our Contact page and send him a message.
GIM Robotics is very eager to build a safe bridge over that notorious chasm together with you.
