A Global Driverless Industrial Vehicle Supplier, VISIONNAV completed $50 Million in C Round Funding, Accelerating Large-scale Replication of Core Logistics Scenarios

 

Recently, VISIONNAV ROBOTICS announced $50 million in C round funding has been completed, jointly invested by Bytedance, Shunwei Capital (Xiaomi), CICC (China Unicom), IDG Capital, Lenovo Ventures and Eastern bell Capital.

VisionNav was founded in 2016, committed to the development of industrial vehicles with L4 driverless technology, providing flexible unmanned logistics solution with driverless industrial vehicles as the core. From 2019 to 2021, VisionNav's performance has increased nearly 10 times. Compared with 2020, the turnover in 2021 has increase by 300%, the amount of average order and repeated purchase orders also both increased by nearly 300%. The deep- water landing scene of focus industries has achieved large-scale repetitive procurement.

 

VisionNav Driverless Industrial Vehicles

This round of funding will be mainly used to increase product scenario development in deep-water scenarios, standardize delivery and layout global scale applications:

1) Continue to develop new products for deep-water scenarios such as heavy-load counterbalanced AGF for both indoors& outdoors, VNA AGF etc., to realize large-scale application of truck loading& unloading, high access and multi-category cage stacking.

2) Expand the product team. Accelerate product delivery and project landing. And achieve standardized delivery in deep-water scenarios;

3) Layout global business. Promote markets in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe, and expand operational support networks;

4) Cooperate with superior suppliers and partners to promote the development of driverless forklift industry.

The spot of driverless industrial vehicles is that the key capabilities of the product cannot fully meet the requirements of customers, including: 1) Comparable peak efficiency of manual operation; 2) High-precision operation; 3) Adaptability to various complex scenes. Recent years, as more and more technology companies enter the industrial unmanned vehicle industry, although the types and functions of products have been enriched, the progress of key capabilities has been slow. In the view of Luyang Li, CEO of VISIONNAV, improving the "flexibility" of driverless industrial vehicles is the key to change this status quo.

In 2021, as VisionNav launches AGF products based on self-developed “3D laser + vision” perception and positioning technology, multi-axis real-time motion planning technology and high-precision visual servo control technology. The "flexibility" has been greatly improved in complex scene large-scale landing. Truck loading& unloading, high access and multi-category cage stacking are also included.

At present, VisionNav has delivered nearly 150 projects, covering various difficult scenarios in many industries. It is reported that VisionNav is one of the enterprises with the widest, most and largest-scale projects of driverless forklift industry in China.

There are more than 200 members in VisionNav, of which more than 70% are R&D personnel. The core team brings together more than 20 PhD and masters from the University of Tokyo, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Harbin Institute of Technology and other famous universities at home and abroad. Members of management team are from the world's top technology such as the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan, Qualcomm, Huawei, DJI, and Emerson.

 

Case Study: Exploration of Intra-logistics Automation in Caterpillar Track Industry

 

Abundant workforce was once one of the most important factors in the boom of manufacturing industry. However, with the decrease of fertility rate, such driving force is seemingly fading out and put a threat on manufacturing industry. Many companies tried to offer high salaries and bonuses to attract more talents, or move their sites to Southeast Asia countries where workforce seems more ample. However, it cannot fundamentally solve labor shortage problem. How to break through such dilemma has long been problems for many Chinese companies in traditional manufacturing industry.

In order to cope with this problem, one of our customers (hereinafter referred to as "customer"), in traditional crawler manufacturing, chose to speed up their process of unmanned production and start the exploration for intra-logistics automation.

【Project Overview】

Established in the early 1990s, customer have been pursuing excellent manufacturing and R&D innovation, constantly introducing new products and providing services to a broader market. The cooperation with VisionNav Robotics also complies with their concept of continuous innovation to conform to social development.

Customer mainly produces and sells undercarriage components for hydraulic excavators and track-type tractors, including link assemblies, track groups and master links with high-quality and low-cost. Its plant covers area of approximately 3,400 square meters with more than 300 employees. Company planned to automatically transfer raw materials stored in the warehouse to the production lines by unmanned forklift AGF, docking with chassis production. Considering situation that personnel in the workshop shall walk around, it is required that AGF shall operate will in human-robot co-work environment, achieving the purpose of human-robot collaboration and logistics automation.

 

【Project Difficulties】

1. Feed material to production line in time. In order to supply raw material timely, it is necessary to accurately obtain the raw material needs of production lines, as well as the location of storage and status information, so that the unmanned forklift can transport and replenish raw materials for production in soonest time.

2. Consider safety and efficiency in human-robot co-work environment. Production workshops and the raw material storage area are in the same space. In addition, there are workshop personnel to move frequently, making operating environment complicated.

 

【Solution】

After comprehensive evaluation of the customer's production process, workshop layout, material specifications, and transportation requirement, VisionNav Robotics provided an unmanned production line logistics solution using pallet stacker type AGF and robot control system. By using vision navigation AGF, there is no need to modify the site, ensuring flexibility and scalability, proofing it a perfect solution for workshops where human-robot co-work and narrow-lane raw material transportation are required; and central control system can also fully integrate with customer production line requirements and warehouse information, ensuring the synchronization of information flow and material flow.

1. AGF Operation Process

1)       Operator manually issues transportation request through call device, robot control system then dispatches AGF to designated location to pick material, and transport to the production line corresponding base location, and put down at the designated location;

2)       When there is an empty pallet at base location, operator shall manually issue transportation request through call device, and robot control system dispatches AGF to the designated location and take the empty pallet and transport it to the empty pallet storage area.

 

2. AGF Function Design

VisionNav Robotics vision navigation AGF adopts self-developed visual positioning, perception and control technology to realize accurate, efficient and flexible handling of materials. AGF and the supporting control system are equipped with functions below:

1)      Positioning and perception. Camera installed on top of AGF captures the image of the site environment, system extract and analyze information from these images to establish map with features of customer’s site. System then can also obtain accurate AGF location and pose information to realize self-localization, motion control and navigation functions with high efficiency, high accuracy and high stability.

2)      Route planning. Based on perception and positioning, combined with actual environment of customer site, AGF can quickly calculate the best path for the operation. Within a certain deviation range, the predetermined route can be automatically retrieved with the help of visual-SLAM system, and automatically self-correct.

3)       Control and communication. Robot central control system can realize remote monitoring of AGF. By using cloud technology to storage big data, AGF can feedback its own state data to robot control system, and realize the information interaction between robot control system and AGF. The interface of robot control system is sleek and simply, operators can quickly master the operation after quick and simple training.

4)       Safety Protection. AGF is equipped with 360° safety protection measures to maintain distance between obstacle and other forklift trucks, ensuring the safety of people, vehicles and goods. Emergency buttons are installed at one side of the AGF to further ensure the safe operation of the vehicle.

 

 

【Added Value】

This project is the first step for the customer to automate its internal factory logistics. By realizing auto transportation of raw materials, seamlessly docking with production line, and timely responding to transportation demand, customer can save labor costs and thus reduce total production cost. AGF operating 7*24 hours can meet day-and-night-shift production needs, making uninterrupted and effective operation of internal logistics possible.

 

【Conclusion】

Since the industrial revolution, the development of industry is the history of development using tools to liberate manpower. The development of automation tools has become more refined. VisionNav Robotics is dedicated to the study and development of driverless industrial vehicles. By providing customers with valuable industrial logistics automation solutions, we can help more and more companies to achieve factory and logistics automation, making contribution to China’s manufacturing for staying vigorous!

 

About VisionNav Robotics         

As a global leader in industrial unmanned vehicles, Visionnav (www.visionnav.cn) has focused on the research and development of unmanned industrial vehicles and unmanned logistics solutions since its establishment in 2016, and insisted on empowering industry with vehicle-level unmanned driving technology. Vehicles promote the flexible unmanned transformation of enterprise internal logistics. At present, the VisionNav Robotics has developed 8 series of unmanned forklift products, and completed the breakthrough in the whole process of just-needed scenes, including 9.4m high access, 2.0m narrow channel access, unmanned loading and unloading trucks, and 6-layer or more mobile rack stacking Waiting for the scene. With unique technical routes and excellent unmanned logistics solutions, robots will achieve rapid growth in the future, with more than 150 landing projects in many fields such as automobile manufacturing, tires, food, petrochemicals, e-commerce logistics, third-party logistics, and pharmaceuticals. Among them, there are many benchmark cases of Fortune 500 companies.