Under this collaboration, SAFELOG will incorporate Opteran Mind, Opteran’s flagship product for autonomous operations, into its mobile robots. These robots are designed to enhance productivity in various industrial settings, including warehouses and factories. This long-term agreement aims to tackle the critical demand for more efficient autonomous robots capable of working in challenging conditions such as dust, dynamic lighting, and areas devoid of GPS, with constantly changing obstacles.

SAFELOG is committed to delivering state-of-the-art mobile robots for order picking and transport tasks. By partnering with Opteran, SAFELOG seeks to pioneer a new class of mobile robots that meld durability with high efficiency. A primary goal of this partnership is to minimise mobile robots' failure rates due to localisation errors—a common issue with existing 2D and 3D LIDAR and vSLAM technologies that significantly impacts productivity. This challenge is intensified in environments where hundreds of robots operate simultaneously, as each setup necessitates a complex infrastructure of magnetic tracks, QR codes, or reflectors, leading to increased setup times and operational expenses. Opteran’s innovative localisation software promises to streamline the deployment of new projects, enabling rapid and cost-effective activation without the need for extensive additional infrastructure.

“There are a lot of challenges for existing autonomy solutions to overcome in the complex conditions of a warehouse, so we have been amazed by what Opteran Mind can achieve,” said Michael Reicheicher, Managing Director, SAFELOG. “Opteran’s technology performs significantly better in our mobile robots, which will be hugely beneficial for our customers. Natural Intelligence, their approach to AI, offers a robust technology that we are confident will differentiate our AMRs in the global market.”

Opteran Mind is based on 10 years of research into insect brains, where the team reverse engineered natural brain algorithms. Fundamentally, nature does navigation more efficiently and by replicating its approach in a model Opteran calls Natural Intelligence, the company has delivered a dramatic breakthrough. It estimates its solution could cost less than $160 USD running on a Sony and ARM Core using Sony IMX219 cameras and RK4566 ARM chips. This contrasts to current state-of-the-art solutions which can range in cost from $8,400 USD for a 2D LiDAR setup to $27,000 USD for a 3D LiDAR set-up .

“We are delighted to announce our partnership with SAFELOG, as this is another significant milestone on our path to commercialising Opteran Mind,” said David Rajan, CEO and co-founder, Opteran Technologies. “We are seeing a rapid take up of our technology across the US, Japan, and Europe so today’s agreement with SAFELOG underlines why our technology is best in class for localisation and mapping for mobile robots. It also shows that while Natural Intelligence is unique in the market our inputs and outputs are standard making Opteran Mind a simple and attractive solution to integrate with existing mobile robots.”