Grand winner Aidrivers at #autonomous challenge of Enterprise Singapore Trade and Connectivity Challenge
Aidrivers, the London-based global specialist in AI-enabled autonomous ecosystems for industrial transport, has beaten more than 400 applicants from 71 countries over 9 months to be named the grand winner of Enterprise Singapore’s Trade and Connectivity Challenge (TCC).
Aidrivers took up the challenge presented by TCC corporate sponsor Toll Group: “How can we develop a teleoperated solution that can retrofit on to brand-agnostic industrial trucks?”
Shortlisted finalists were invited to present their solutions at a special ‘Pitch Day’ held at Enterprise Singapore’s offices. Judges declared Aidrivers the ultimate winner of the top award.
The approach by Aidrivers to the Toll Group challenge was to provide a hybrid autonomous and teleoperation solution to meet the needs for sustainable future. The truck platform is designed to carry out navigation and instruction based on autonomous operations. Teleoperations by remote driving or remote instruction-based assist intervenes during complicated task execution and edge cases, and in any periods of unstable network.
“Toll Group was looking for a vehicle-agnostic autonomous software solution provider to retrofit and convert their industrial manual trucks, including forklifts and reach-stackers, to be teleoperated, to improve utilisation level and productivity,” said Kelvin Zhou, Aidrivers Chief Business Development Officer.
“The advantages of our proposed approach include deployment safety, operational reliability and efficiency, while edge computing improves response time and saves bandwidth.”
The Aidrivers autonomous ecosystem doesn’t have any particular environment or infrastructure dependency therefore it’s a scalable and sustainable approach for existing logistics operations and, maximises the potential for commercialisation and fleet scale-up by using current IT infrastructure, and delivers true savings in labour costs, added Mr Zhou.
“The autonomous technology delivers the intelligence capability that bridges the gap between the vehicle and the human operator by enhancing experience of the safety, ease of operations as well as improving quality of working environment by reducing skills requires through autonomous enabled teleoperated ground handling vehicles.”
The Trade and Connectivity Challenge is organised by Enterprise Singapore to drive partnerships between corporates and startups, to co-create key innovative solutions that address on-the-ground industry needs and boost digital transformation in the trade and connectivity sectors. The 2023 event was the fourth edition of the challenge.
Dr Rafiq Swash, Founder and CEO of Aidrivers, said: “We were absolutely delighted that out of 400+ applicants from 71 countries, Aidrivers is named the grand winner of the Trade and Connectivity Challenge. This is a strategic project and very much looking forward to collaborating with Toll logistics as At Aidrivers, our mission is accelerating autonomous technology to deliver the optimisation, resilience and safety that the ports and logistics industry needs for a sustainable future.”
Ai and Autonomous enabled teleoperation solution is the use of human operators, based in a control centre, to monitor and manage fleet of ground handling vehicles remotely. The remote operator has full governing and control over the fleet and handling all operations and key decision-making. In its challenge set out for the Enterprise Singapore event, Toll Group noted that a suitable teleoperated solution could be applied to all its warehousing facilities with effective scalability and sustainability.
