MetraLabs provides leading technologies for autonomous vehicles and service robots. The company unites expertise in software, mechanical and electrical engineering.

MetraLabs is a German SME and produces high-performance autonomous mobile robot platforms like the SCITOS G5, X3 and TORY and complete service robot applications. As one of the first companies in the world MLAB has successfully launched service robots that do their job in grocery and DIY stores, fast food restaurants and clean rooms everyday and fully autonomous. All in all more than 60000 autonomously driven kilometres were completed in commercial applications. The company was founded in the environment to the Ilmenau University of Technology (Germany) in 2001.

As one of the first companies in the world MLAB has successfully launched service robots that do their job everyday and fully autonomous.

Role

MLAB will do research about swarm intelligence of mobile robots and their horizontal and vertical integration (WP4 Task 4.1) and contributes to the realization of use cases.

Key contribution

The research about the feasibility of using autonomous, self-organized swarms of automated guided vehicles as well as the design of fully integrated, hybrid transportation system consisting of OHT, AGV and conveyor based solutions can lead to a guideline to implement an optimized manufacturing and logistic design of semiconductor fabs capable of coping with the new challenges that are outlined by Industry 4.0. In this connection MetraLabs contributes to the characterization of a swarm of mobile autonomous vehicles and develops strategies how several vehicles can act together to perform tasks in the fab. Demonstrators will be realized and will be studied in terms of compliance criteria, bottleneck situations or lot queuing, resulting in new models.