50 Digest | Robotique Occitane ROC-E AIV afford to wait five years to start making sales and revenue,” Dehlinger says. “That took a lot of our team’s ingenuity and health – but they remained motivated to show our previous employer that they were wrong to fire us, and they’ve demonstrated to me that I have some of the best engineers in the world in my team.” Lastly, the company has also sought to make its robot and business operations as ecologically friendly as possible, both for the sake of the environment and for avoiding wastefulness in r&d and production (and some of the different ways they are achieving this are discussed henceforth). Top to bottom SWaP As mentioned, ROC-E consists broadly of four sections: a customised payload system on top, a comms system underneath, then some ROC-E-specific mission hardware components and the NOEME vehicular platform at the bottom. NOEME is roughly 27 x 67 x 46 cm in size. Its subsections encompass a drivetrain system below, sensors for perception and localisation, computers for processing sensor data and a technical bay of around 3 x 50 x 38 cm, into which mission-specific electronics and interfacing equipment pertaining to ROC-E can be installed. “If you compare the NOEME AIV against similar-looking, warehouse-type AMRs, you see NOEME is significantly smaller, lighter and therefore more agile; that’s how it can work in busy, unpredictable places like trade expo floors,” Dehlinger says. “As well as aiming for minimal size and weight, we’ve also cut the integration costs as much as possible, which are so high that when you buy a conventional AMR, you actually pay around three times its price to cover integrating and deploying it into your business.” Such costs often begin with hiring an integration consultant or manager, and building and installing mission-specific adapters or other equipment atop the vehicle. Then, it must be integrated into the organisation’s communication system, usually via wi-fi, which requires a highly reliable, homogenous wi-fi network covering an entire industrial area (a major technical challenge and investment, with no guarantee that a suitable network preexists the AMR acquisition). “And another problem with AMRs conventionally depending on wi-fi, is that wi-fi isn’t built for persistent connections with moving vehicles – meaning such vehicles often experience frequent comms losses, false echoes and similar problems,” Dehlinger adds. “Myriad other projects and costs follow, covering integration into the company’s IT system, the building of a fleet management system, getting a cloud server to host that, and so on. So, one of the key targets for ROC-E was building its autonomy, comms and cybersecurity to avoid almost all those integration problems, including keeping the base system very open so we can program the customer’s choice of interfacing protocols, OSs and other standards into their robot’s computer and network before delivery, saving them much of the work. “That’s how we’ve opened up 95% of our present-day, previously untapped market customers for indoor autonomous robots, which are largely SMEs of 10-50 people who could never afford the conventional integration August/September 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Various cargo-handling modules are created for the ROC-E AIV by Usitech and Occion, including shelves, conveyors, robotic arms and small scissor lifts like this one
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4