Uber for Factory
We are on for a pilot soon!
The first one is in a manufacturing facility and we have come up with this clever (ahem!) metaphor of an uber for factory user flow. While the eventual usage for a vehicle such as ours will be API driven (some operational or business application will call APIs on the vehicle), pilots can easily benefit from an uber like workflow. Material typically has to be moved between Stations A, B, C … N. We give an app to be used on a phone or tablet that allows requesting the vehicle to go from point A to N. Vehicle comes over, notifies. User loads stuff and hits start trip. On the other side, user gets notified that vehicle is on the way with an ETA. Receive stuff, end trip. Done.
Here is a small test we did mocking such a workflow in our test environment.
What we see is that the application layer on top of the vehicle can become pretty specific to a vertical. For example, the above workflow won’t work in an eCommerce warehouse (where incidentally our next pilot is). Thankfully, the software stack on the vehicle is nicely decoupled from the application on top and we can easily create the right interfaces needed.
One more thing we saw coming into these pilots is that a more industrial vehicle like design is more suited in these environments and most of the use cases were within a 150kg payload capability. That prompted our team to spin a new vehicle in record time with a much more compact footprint for this smaller payload. Here is the design render, but we should have the real vehicle in showcase next month. Watch this space!
