Laser Guidance for Robot - Design and Manufacture Project

Guidance Automation’s technology has been leveraged by state-of-the-art driverless vehicles for indoor warehouse usage for over three decades. The company approached Solsta to help develop a next generation laser guidance system to cut costs and improve resilience.
Traditionally, robots have operated on the shop floor using a rotating LiDAR system that sent out a continuous beam – searching for retroreflector target surfaces in known locations, reflecting the signal back towards its source. This approach required a shop visit by the vendor or a surveyor to install reflectors (both initially and whenever the layout was changed), and the robot also needed a second, short-range laser scanner as a safety device.
Today, these machines do not need mapped reflectors as the robots can self-map the warehouse without them. Guidance Automation wanted to combine this floorplan-agnostic guidance system laser with a laser capable of detecting all natural features. This would cut costs, improve product resilience and fully futureproof the company against threats from the competition.
Guidance Automation lacked the internal resources and sector knowledge to take this optical system concept to the next step, so they turned to trusted partner Solsta whose Special Projects Group developed a range finder based on a pulsed laser and an avalanche photodiode (APD). The combination of these innovations, alongside clever software to pick the signal out of background noise, gives the sensitivity needed to determine the robot’s position against both a floorplan and those moving within it.
Material costs for the unit are kept highly competitive. Combined with Solsta’s DFM approach to design which allows quick and efficient assembly at their Weymouth manufacturing plant, this innovative solution has a per-unit price which is lower than competing off-the-shelf solutions with lesser capabilities.