Roads Interface

OTTO Motors is an autonomous robotics company focused on indoor material handling. In my last month of employment I was asked to propose a new interaction paradigm for their software to make it more intuitive and structured.

Warehouse automation traditionally uses AGVs (automated guided vehicles) that follow physical magnetic strips on the floor to travel from one place to another. OTTO Motors created a fully autonomous robot that does not require any physical infrastructure and relies on an internal map that can be easily updated without any physical changes to the environment.

At the time, the users managed the robot’s workable areas by creating virtual zones on a map. Users were required to create dozens of polygonal zones with special instructions such as off-limit zones, access by payload, speed limits, time restrictions, etc. We identified that all this work was going into telling the robot where it can’t go, but not where it could go.

Our proposed interaction simplifies this whole process by using a real-world analogy: roads.