Scientists of the department 305 "Flight Navigation and Information and Measurement complexes" of the Moscow Aviation Institute, together with the Status Consult company, have developed a smart unmanned cargo platform. It will help optimize transportation within factories, warehouses, and transportation facilities, such as airports. The platform independently navigates the space, builds routes and makes decisions in real time. The tests have been completed and two patents have been obtained.
– Large enterprises are automating production, but internal logistics is still largely based on manual labor. Moving materials, components, and finished products between sites is a routine but resource—intensive process: it takes up the working time of specialists and, in conditions of continuous production, does not forgive mistakes. The problem is especially acute at airports and transport infrastructure facilities, where cargo traffic does not stop around the clock," said Vladimir Petrukhin, a project participant, senior lecturer, and leading engineer at the 305 MAI Department.
The MAI platform allows you to take transport processes offline: to reallocate the resources of specialists in favor of more complex tasks, reduce operating costs and improve the safety of the production environment.
The platform requires neither a driver nor a remote operator. After receiving the task, the robot builds a route by itself, moves to the desired point and constantly "looks" around — notices people, loaders and other obstacles, drives around them on the move or stops.
The key technical solution of this development is an integrated approach to autonomy. The platform integrates into the company's digital infrastructure: it exchanges data with production management systems, coordinates movement with other participants, and adapts to changes in real time.
The usual warehouse robots move like trams on rails: specially for them, magnetic tapes with radio frequency tags are mounted in the floor. This is convenient in a perfectly structured warehouse, but it hardly works in the real conditions of large-scale production, where the situation is constantly changing.
The new platform simultaneously uses several independent sources of navigation data — satellite navigation, inertial sensors, cameras, lidars and UWB (ultra-broadband). If one source fails, the platform focuses on the rest: the algorithm constantly checks the reliability of the navigation solution.
The development was created taking into account the concept of a "digital enterprise": in the future, several such platforms will be able to coordinate movement among themselves, forming intelligent logistics corridors without human intervention.
The work was carried out with the support of the Innovation Promotion Foundation within the framework of the Razvitie-CT competition. The team is currently developing artificial intelligence algorithms and preparing the technology for scaling to large industrial sites.
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