Automation of Robot Data Collection for Business Insights

Introduction
All right, guess we’ll go ahead and get started. Got a nice big crowd over here, really excited about that. So today we’re gonna be talking to you about the automation of data collection for business analytics, specifically, in the robotics context. And just to give you a little bit of information about myself, my name is Abraham Dauhajre. I am the Head of Solutions at Formant and I’ve been working at the intersection of hardware and software for a very long time. And I’ve had a lifelong passion for robotics. That’s me as a kid at a robotics competition, maybe 20 years ago. So, sort of in my blood.

Root cause analysis
So we’re gonna tell you a root-causing story. We can’t really share our customer data with you, but we’ve done something very special here, we’ve built the simulation of a warehouse and we’re gonna tell you a story of how we see our customers and how they can see the right way to actually root-cause a problem, solve it, deploy it and verify it. So we have this fake company called Bots and Boxes where we sell and ship fuses and sprockets, two components absolutely essential for robotics. And every warehouse has three AGVs, very classic type AGV, see a bunch of them here at the conference. Couple of robot arms and a couple of human operators that have introduced some level of entropy into the system.

Robot simulation
Now, we have taken this fairly seriously. We have directly instrumented the physics and the game engine to provide us some real instrumentation and some real data that we can then take, analyze and derive results from. What couple of examples of that are modeling things like battery drain based on AGV load. Measuring the weight of the pallet that’s on the AGV and how that directly impacts the actually battery. Things that make this feel like a real-world application. And we’ve gone ahead and deployed this to 10 global warehouse sites. Now, we’re running this in the cloud and my CEO’s over there and he’s probably angry with me they’re not running this on 10 EC2 instances that cost quite a bit of money per hour to run but we do this so that we can actually take camera images from all of the game simulations add real data and actually enjoy this and actually be able to show you something that does make sense. So we’ve also done somewhat around building out analytics dashboards, KPIs, things that we think in the warehouse industry would be very important for someone to track.

Automated alerts

So here’s our story. We’re gonna start with automated alert. It’s going to inform a KPI we wanna take a look at. And then when we’re looking at the KPI we’re actually gonna time travel back to the point in time where that alert was generated and try to investigate the problem.