49 robot purpose-engineered on top of the NOEME vehicle,” Dehlinger explains. “It is ROC-E that is the customised, finished and turnkey product we deliver to customers for improving their productivity by taking on a wide range of intralogistics and organisational tasks for them. Those tasks depend entirely on the duties they’d like to outsource to the AIV, and the limits of their creativity and ours in terms of designing their payload system to integrate and function atop the robot.” ROC-E is a battery-electric, wheeled robot, typically measuring 90 x 67 x 46 cm, capable of carrying up to 100 kg and moving at up to 0.8 m/s (2.88 kph). It can operate for up to 10 hours between recharges, with those energy replenishments taking two hours as standard. Fresh start Unusually, RobOcc came together as a company after its initial members had departed from another robotics company, largely owing to the latter’s owner. “I had joined that company as CEO in 2018, ostensibly to help save it, but I left over disagreements and soon after, the owner fired 16 of the company’s 20 employees. In pursuit of a new challenge, we decided to rejoin each other without that owner and launch a new robot project in Q4 2022,” Dehlinger recounts. “Eight of us working in RobOcc are its cofounders, plus three outside co-founders: one is a factory owner, another owns an electronics design and manufacturing company, and the last is VP in another robotics company – and we share a lot of technical advice with each other while building different robots that don’t directly compete – theirs are very big!” As well as around €1 million in funding gathered collectively among its cofounders, key to developing ROC-E from a blank sheet was the use of ROS 2 and Nav2 by RobOcc’s engineers. The former has been discussed extensively in this publication, and is today a widely used open-source middleware and SDK toolset for robotic and autonomous applications. The latter is based on ROS 2 (while being another successor to the ROS navigation stack in its own right), with autonomy-centric aspects optimised for dealing with navigation challenges for ground and maritime surface robots. These include tools for perception, dynamic path planning, control, localisation and obstacle avoidance (as well as detailed behavioural trees) to facilitate customised, intelligent and reliable guidance through complex environments, together with execution of application tasks. “And our team is one of the top contributors to Nav2’s open-source community worldwide, giving back as much as we can considering our unique ability to operate in environments beyond the industrial spaces familiar to AMR- and AGV-makers, while some qualities of our software do also remain closed,” Dehlinger says. By June 2023, following six-toseven months of rapid development, ROC-E’s first prototype was effectively completed. Productionisation followed similarly quickly thereafter: RobOcc applied for numerous patents covering its technologies in July, and the first commercial unit was signed for by RobOcc’s launch customer (Safran) in December later that year, with the system delivered, integrated and operational by the subsequent month. “It took them two weeks to go through installation – a few hours for that, IT audits, cybersecurity audits and a week of operational tests – they’d never managed a robotic deployment with such speed before,” Dehlinger comments. RobOcc attributes much of that peculiar pace to its engineers having targeted a few key challenges typically faced by AMRtype UGVs. One was keeping its design simple enough that it can be assembled as a kit, anywhere in the world. Additionally, making the system cyber-secure and assuring quality were both vital, as Dehlinger says. “If you are not building the robot yourself but just shipping a kit for the customer to put together, you need to be incredibly confident in the integrity of what you’re shipping.” By keeping to a simple, kit-built design and also using COTS subsystems where possible (to avoid customisation expenses, and ease transparency and maintenance by avoiding unique, unfamiliar, undocumented products), RobOcc saved on manufacturing costs and hence working capital, enabling it to operate through to June 2024 when customer payments started flowing in. “That in turn brought an issue of timing; robots like ROC-E typically take around five years to develop, not the half-year we took, but we couldn’t Robotique Occitane ROC-E AIV | Digest Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2025 ROC-E was rapidly developed from a blank sheet within roughly half a year, with ROS 2 and Nav2 being key development tools
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