Founded in 2019, WAKU Robotics is a young and modern remote working company based in Dresden and Berlin. WAKU supports international logistics and production companies along their automation journey with mobile robots, enabling them to explore and select (LotsOfBots), as well as implement and commission the best robotic solutions (WAKU Plan). The main product of WAKU Robotics is WAKU Sense, a vendor-agnostic robot control tower that can be used to connect, operate, and control multi-fleet robotic systems in warehouses.
Easy Engineering: What’s the news about new products?
WAKU Robotics: The latest updates on WAKU Sense contain valuable features that will help our customers to run mixed-fleet robots reliably. Below some of the latest features are listed.
Intelligent Area Limits – So far, there has been no simple solution for the efficient and safe use of a common route for robots from different manufacturers and manual forklifts. WAKU Sense’s “intelligent Area Limits” allow you to create traffic rules for specific zones with simple drag & drop. As a result, traffic jams or blockages can be avoided and mixed fleets can operate reliably.
Error Heatmap – Fixing errors quickly or even avoiding them requires a real-time overview of bottlenecks and typical causes of errors. With the new error heatmaps, robot operators can better understand where and when errors occur on the surface. Targeted and immediate intervention avoids long downtimes.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
WAKU Robotics: With the manufacturer-independent comparison platform for mobile robots, LotsOfBots, we offer a contact point for innovators and logistics decision-makers when entering into automation with mobile robots. In addition, LotsOfBots offers a platform for robot manufacturers to establish their brand, gain visibility and present themselves professionally and in a target group-specific manner on the market.
We provide gold and premium profiles for this, which manufacturers can use to optimize their appearance and advertise their products in an even more targeted manner.
WAKU Plan is the consulting part of WAKU Robotics. After walking through LotsOfBots, WAKU Plan helps our customers with finding the right solution for their specific use cases. We support our customers with professional solution design and also accompany the buying / renting process of the mobile robots.
With WAKU Sense, we offer a software-as-a-service product that, as a robot control tower, is able to successfully analyze and orchestrate mobile robots from different manufacturers. This enables our customers to exploit the full potential of their mobile robot fleets. WAKU Sense is vendor-independent and able to quickly connect to new robots. The traffic management of WAKU Sense allows mixed-fleet operations with robots from different manufacturers.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
WAKU Robotics: Currently, the market of mobile robots in logistics is immature and very fragmented. This is the reason why potential buyers of mobile robots (AGVs and AMRs) have no clear overview of what is on the market. Here, LotsOfBots.com comes in and helps to make the market visible.
In addition to that, potential customers of mobile robots thinking about automating more and more use cases in their facilities. Even if the hardware of the robots is ready for that (in terms of use cases), the software to orchestrate all of these devices is not. This is why we build WAKU Sense to enable mixed-fleet operations.
End customer that currently using mobile robots on their shopfloors often recognize that robots are standing around or having problems with something. For that, we developed the instant alerting feature, that forwards this information to the human operator in real-time.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
WAKU Robotics: Mobile robots in manufacturing companies are more common at the moment. But based on this model, logistics companies are now also trying to accelerate their robot adaption. The logistics market in general is growing very fast and with it the demand for workers. This also leads to the trend that some manufacturers of mobile robots now offering complete fulfillment systems like goods to person systems (G2P).
Also, more specialized robots entering the market like bin-picking robots that combine drive unit and mounted actuators.
What we also see is that in manufacturing the need for mixed fleets of AGVs and AMRs is a bottleneck for further adaption. Slowly, the number of software solutions for that emerging. One solution that is already on the market is WAKU Sense.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
WAKU Robotics: In each category there are distinctive unique solutions, that we call “category leaders”. Some examples for these category leaders are Tugbot for tugging carts, TruPhysics for bin picking with mounted actuators and for swarm robot guided picking solutions it is Locus Robotics. There are also many innovations apart from the mobile robots themselves. A prime example is wireless charging as revolutionized by Gapcharge and Wiferion.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2022?WAKU Robotics: So far in 2022, we have perceived that robot adoption has already increased significantly. This is also due to the fact that more companies are testing robot solutions in practice. This is another incentive for the big manufacturers to further release robots on a large scale. It’s also significant to say that robotic solutions will