Clearpath Robotics Enters Self-Driving Vehicle Industry With GE Backing
Photo: Clearpath Robotics.
Today, Canada’s Clearpath Robotics announced that it is shifting into the self-driving vehicle industry with the announcement of its OTTO warehouse robot.
The company, which has traditionally made field and service robots, designed OTTO to transport heavy loads in industrial environments. The company likens the technology in the robot to Google’s self-driving car, since it uses “dynamic and efficient transport” in increasingly congested areas.
OTTO navigates a warehouse facility without relying on external infrastructure, instead using path planning and object avoidance. It moves at up to 4.5 mph while transporting up to 3,300 pounds of goods.
“North American manufacturers are constantly under pressure to find new ways to gain an edge against low-cost offshore competition. Traditional automation is saturating, but what about the more complex tasks too difficult or expensive to automate?” says Matt Rendall, CEO and cofounder of Clearpath Robotics. “We created OTTO to reinvent material transport and give North American manufacturers a new edge.”
One of Clearpath’s first OTTO customers is GE, which the company partnered with in 2013 and now has GE Ventures as one of its strategic investors.
“We believe robotics will drastically improve the industries that GE serves,” says Ralph Taylor-Smith, managing director of GE Ventures. “We look forward to further partnering with Clearpath and exploring the role large-scale service robots may play for us and for our customers in the future. This Clearpath investment from GE reflects a deepening of the industrial partnership in advanced manufacturing and field service operations with self-driving vehicles and service robots.”
