Cyngn DriveMod now helps mobile robots navigate outdoors

Cyngn announced this week that its AI-powered autonomous navigation solution, DriveMod, can now operate in outdoor environments. This means organizations can send the DriveMod Tugger on missions that go indoors and outdoors, giving facility managers even more opportunity to automate repetitive workflows and shift employees over to more interesting, higher-value tasks.

Modern warehouses and manufacturing facilities are increasingly large. Many of them surpass 200,000 square feet and even include multiple buildings. The result is that moving materials from point A to point B has become increasingly complex.

“One of the biggest pain points businesses face is the wasted time and resources involved in transporting materials between buildings,” Sean Stetson, Cyngn’s VP of engineering, said. “This time-consuming task ties up equipment and pulls workers away from where they’re most needed, resulting in expensive lost productivity. By automating these tasks, companies can eliminate these inefficiencies, shifting workers to other responsibilities.”

By extending DriveMod’s capabilities outdoors, Cyngn says it provides organizations with a system that eliminates bottlenecks in material movement. This includes transporting goods between outdoor storage areas and facilitating smoother transitions across multi-building facilities.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company develops and deploys scalable, differentiated autonomous vehicle technology for industrial organizations. Its DriveMod Kit can be installed on new industrial vehicles or retrofitted into existing fleets. Cyngn is a public company listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker CYN.

Cyngn’s new capabilities a response to customer demand

Given the costly challenge of moving materials between buildings in a large site, several companies have engaged Cyngn to automate outdoor operations, the company says.

“Businesses are asking for more than just indoor efficiency. As a result, this marks a major milestone in broadening our reach and catering to the diverse needs of customers,” Cyngn CEO Lior Tal said. “The future of automation isn’t just about optimizing indoor spaces; it’s about creating smarter, more flexible solutions that cater to the full spectrum of operational environments.”

Cyngn said the ability to operate outdoors opens new doors for DriveMod users. It can empower facility managers to automate the movement of goods in previously manual outdoor workflows, creating a fully connected system between indoor and outdoor operations.

Other indoor-outdoor navigation solutions

Outdoor navigation can be difficult for robots, especially ones built to operate inside warehouses. Outside, there are much fewer permanent features robots can use to figure out where it is and where it needs to go. While autonomous navigation for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) or automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have traditionally been limited to indoor operations, Cyngn isn’t the first company to break the mold.

RGo Robotics, for example, has made the ability to operate inside and outside a cornerstone of its technology. The company offers a modular AI and computer vision software system called the RGo Perception Engine. It provides real-time localization, obstacle detection, and object recognition data.

Additionally, in July 2023, BlueBotics unveiled ANT everywhere, a product extension that allows AGVs and AMRs to operate inside and outside. The company added GNSS with real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning to its system, enabling outdoor operations.

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