TECHNOLOGY – BLACK-i ROBOTICS

The past five years have seen an explosion of innovative technology amid declining prices, the most publicized being Artificial Intelligence (AI). Black-I Robotics has developed a range of robust intellectual property that has enabled us to become the first robot company to fully integrate all the new technologies and create a breakthrough system specifically for the logistics industry.

Black-I’s powerful, intelligent heavy lift arm -- the “Holy Grail '' of the logistics industry -- helps eliminate what plant personnel see as their most pressing challenges -- lack of workers, injuries, spiraling costs.

Black-I's Robot Worker Does the Work of Many.

Artificial Intelligence, RCS control, and human-oriented machine vision are just some of the technologies we developed and implemented in-house. We integrated these technologies with highly sophisticated off-the-shelf devices and software while shaping critical joints and other hardware required to lift and balance heavy payloads.

We used our internally developed Artificial Intelligence, for example, to enable the arm to recognize totes, tote lids and april tags, a requirement of one of our customers. We developed RCS middleware to convert ROS signals to Galil format so that Galil can run the arm’s motors. We use five realsenses vision modules to create a 3D occupancy grid scene of the working environment to help us calculate optimum path for arm motion. Another vision module locates the object to be picked, while we use lidar and cameras to create our human safety perimeter.

Key to machine vision has been our partnership with Ascend Robotics, located in nearby Cambridge and headed by experts in machine learning from MIT. Ascend’s specialty is vision-guided arm control and human-centered robot control interfaces, which has enabled us to deliver a turnkey mobile manipulation system that can be integrated into a customer’s MES or WMS.

What all this mobile technology does among other benefits is replace scarce human workers with robot workers that thrive on repetitive labor. It also makes it possible to reduce or eliminate stationary robots at the end of each production line, saving millions of dollars over time. It speeds time to market. It also gives warehouse staff a range of new services such as inspection on arrival and real-time management reports. It’s a plant manager’s new best friend!