Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and industrial computing device maker Adlink Technology on September 24 inaugurated FARobot, their joint venture for developing autonomous mobile robot (AMR) solutions.
FARobot is initially capitalized at NT$200 million (US$6.8 million), with Foxconn and Adlink holding 51% and 49% respectively. FARobot will focus on developing AMR solutions for manufacturing, warehousing, retail operation and medical care. FARobot plans to unveil AMR prototypes in October 2020, and is expected results in three years. FARobot-developed AMR solutions are likely to be trialed at Foxconn's factories beginning 2021.
FARobot is expected to capitalize on the two parent companies' domain knowledge and data collected from Foxconn's many production lines, and use factories of Foxconn and its supply chain partners to test its solutions, said Foxconn chairman Liu Young-way.
FARobot will develop a swarm robotic system (SRS), real-time fleet management system software based on swarm autonomy bionic algorithm. By virtue of DDS (data distribution service) adopted by ROS (robot operating system) 2 project under Open Source Robotics Foundation, SRS will enable real-time communication among individual AMRs of a fleet and between AMRs and DDS-based devices. The communication is to create collective perception, with sensing data collected from every AMR to be aggregated as global view for optimizing collaborative decision making.
Foxconn chairman Liu Young-way (left) and Adlink chairman Jim Liu
Photo: Foxconn
Article translated by Adam Hwang
