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.

 

Forklift AGV Cross-Floor Material Transportation Collaboratively, Helping Well-Known Food Processing Company to Achieve Smart Manufacturing

 

 

This customer is a well-known domestic food processing group with global sales network. It owns several production base in and outside the country, with more than 5,000 employees. The company is also the first food processing company to pass FDA national audit activities in China.

Raw material warehouse located on 3/F, the top floor, and the temperature is high due to its geographical location, which is not not suitable for any staff to stay for a long time. When the production workshop sends out material transportation tasks, it will take 20 minutes for the operator to arrive at the third floor and pick cargo after receiving tasks information.

 

What was worse, an outdated elevator is used for material transportation between floors, the space is very limited for one pallet, and if the pallet is not placed well, it is very difficult to pick out the cargo. Without efficient management to the elevator, conflicts are easily raised when there are storage and retrieve tasks between different floors, so that the material delivery is always not in time thus reduce production efficiency.

 

To improve production management, upgrades techniques for industry needs, the customer have decided to introduce unmanned facilities, that is VisionNav’s unmanned logistics solutions, to improve its product competitiveness.

 

 

 

Project Requirement

There are 3 floors in the building, 1F is loading area, 2F is workshop, 3F is raw material warehouse. Packaging material, which is empty bottles, needs to be transported with chuan-type pallets and tian-type pallets. Forklift AGV needs to transport raw material from 1F loading bay to 3F raw material warehouse for storage and retrieval. When there are material delivery requirements sending from 2F production line, forklift AGV will transport raw material from 3F warehouse to 2F production area. There are 5 production lines in 2F.

 

Solution / Product
01. Mini Reach Truck AGV

 

02.Bright-Eye Environmental Monitoring System

By seamless integrating with customer site WMS system and VisionNav WCS system, data flow can be interacted quick and accurately. The systems involved in the products include: Bright-Eye Environmental Monitoring System, WCS system, elevator docking system, handheld terminal system, etc. to realize comprehensive control of the human, cargo, vehicle and equipments.

 

 

Solution Overview:

Following Existing Operation Processes

（1）Raw Material Storage-in: from 1F loading bay to 3F warehouse

• After raw material is unloadedand labelled at the loading bay, WMS system will issue commands anddispatch transportation tasks for 2 elevators based on actual productionsituation: use two elevators to transport raw material from 1F to 3Fwarehouse during idle time, in case production is busy then distribute oneelevator for material transportation between 2F production and 3Fwarehouse.
• When cargo from 1Fenter the elevator, the forklift AGV on 3F will automatically goes infront of the elevator and wait. If the system did not send out anyretrieve instructions, then 2 forklift AGV will execute storage-in taskscollaboratively.

 

Project Highlight

✓In the past, when cargo is placed into the elevator by manual forklifts, the placement is always not appropriate, making it very difficult to pick cargo out of the elevator. Now when using forklift AGV, by using multiple sensor in front of the forklift and at fork arm ends, the pallet position can be detected automatically without forklift AGV entering the elevator.

 

✓ Forklift AGV can self-adjusts its own posture to pick the cargo, so that pallet will not be placed inappropriately, not hitting the elevator leading cargo collapse.

 

✓ Forklift AGV is equipped with RFID scanner, after scanning the cargo information, it will automatically transport the pallet to designated storage location.

 

（2）Material Delivery For Production Area: from 3F Warehouse to 2F Production

• When there is inneed of material, system will send material retrieval tasks to forkliftAGV on 3F, to co-work with forklift AGV on 2F, to transport raw materialto the corresponding buffer area for production line. The time spent forthe entire process will reduce from 20min to 10 min, dramatically reducetime and improve production efficiency.
•  

 

Project Highlight
✓ For the production lines on 2F, VisionNav set up 5 buffer areas, there are 10 locations in each area. With VisionNav’s Bright-Eye location monitoring system, the utilization of the location can be smarter, more visualized and more effective.
✓ Under the monitoring of Bright-Eye system, the storage location situation of the buffer area can be monitored and uploaded in real time to WMS system. If any pallet in the locations is taken away, central control system will schedule the forklift AGV on 3F to execute retrieve tasks, making sure that enough material will be stored in the buffer area to flexibly adapt to consumption rate of different production line, and help to smooth the production.

 

 

（3）Warehouse Management: 3F Raw Material Warehouse

• During productionidle time, WMS system will issue commands to schedule forklift AGV on 3Fraw material warehouse to reallocate the pallet locations.

 

Project Highlight

✓ With VisionNav deep learning visual perception technology, forklift AGV can identify pallets with different loads and send to designated areas. Remaining storage capacity can also be calculated to make space for other pallets , releasing storage capacity pressure, increasing storage capacity and facilitating better storage management.

from https://www.visionnav.com/articledetail/87.html