The company aims to expand the lineup and strengthen the integrated control technology for enhancing the optimal transport area for production sites.

OMRON Automation, the leading industrial automation solutions provider, has introduced mobile robot "MD-650" to strengthen its contribution towards the optimization of transportation efficiency at production sites. By expanding the lineup of mobile robots that support the medium payload range (650 kg), OMRON aims to realize integrated control and autonomous running at various production sites.

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly important to create factories and workplaces that have better ways of handling burden of repetitive and manual workload in addition to pursuing higher standards of productivity and quality. Inter-process transport work, which repeatedly transports heavy objects such as materials, work-in-progress, and finished products, requires increased efficiency, but it also places a heavy physical burden on workers. For example, in the automobile industry, due to the development of a high-mix, low-volume production system, transportation destinations have been dispersed to multiple locations leading to a significant increase in manual workload burden.

This holds more importance for complex production sites where the demand for transport automation is huge and dynamic. Different management systems are required for each individual or process. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in each system to smoothly transport a wide variety of heavy objects and to secure management man-hours.

"MD-650"corresponds to 650kg, which is the middle payload range in OMRON's lineup from 60 to 1500kg. Aiming to realize safe and smooth transportation, this not only makes it possible to select the most suitable mobile robot for transport in each process from OMRON’s lineup, but also allows to build a system for each mobile robot with different weight capacity using OMRON’s unique software technology "OMRON Fleet Manager". Up to 100 units can be integrated and controlled on one system to realize transport optimization for the installation site. 

OMRON, in Asia Pacific, aims to make further in roads into automotive and logistics industries with the help of this robot. As shared by Don Teng, Managing Director, OMRON Asia Pacific, “OMRON holds a preeminent position in the realm of advanced, safe & agile automation solutions. The MD-650 AMR is engineered to meet the highest safety standards as outlined in the international ISO3691-4 guidelines and is a great asset for empowering automotive manufacturers, logistics solution providers, and their end consumers to maneuver the complexities of a challenging cost competitive environment by many factors such as global competition, varying demand, short delivery times, high product variety, increasing design complexity, electrification,skill shortages, regulatory and compliance requirements, to name just a few.”

Product Features

1. High-speed and safe transportation achieved with medium weight capacity*¹top-level*² transportation speed and unique obstacle avoidance algorithm

Based on the implementation results, it operates smoothly even in narrow aisles with a maximum speed of 2.2m/sec, advanced navigation function, and obstacle avoidance algorithm. In addition, by introducing advanced battery and charging technology, it can operate for 8 hours with 30 minutes of charging.

2.Integrated control of all mobile robots using unique software technology

Real-time control of the integrated transfer routes and transfer order of up to 100 mobile robots with different payloads can be achieved on a single system. Through high-level coordination with a single system, the optimum route is constructed in real time even for transport between processes with different production speeds, realizing efficient transport with little stagnation.

3. High level of safety conforming to international standard ISO3691-4*³Compliant
The robot comes with ISO3691-4 (established in 2020), the latest safety standard for industrial automated guided vehicles. 

OMRON strives to work on the development of safe and high-quality mobile robots to contribute towards reducing the burden of transportation processes in various industries. It is also working towards strengthening its unique software control to realize safe and optimized transport routes on-site across i. OMRON will continue to realize automation that maximizes human value and create a prosperous future for people, industry and the earth.

*¹Mobile robot model with a payload range of 500 to 900 kg
*² As of June 2023, according to our research
*³ International safety standards applied to automated guided vehicles and systems such as AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) and AMR (Autonomous MobileRobot) standard. Requirements for safety functions and methods for validating the validity of automatic vehicle functions are defined.

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