Third Wave is excited to announce our Strategic Partnership with Toyota Industries!
Check out the Toyota Press Release, and the domestic Third Wave Press Release
And News Coverage
Over the past couple of years we have been developing some groundbreaking material handling solutions. Third Wave’s technology is a proprietary blend of three key ingredients: adaptive automation, shared autonomy, and continuous learning.
Adaptive automation is intelligent. Historically, industrial automation has been rigid or brittle. It’s been hard coded to follow a linear set of instructions. Move from A to B, perform motion C, etc. Any unexpected wrinkle to that plan would break the whole system. Third Wave’s approach is different: we utilize the most advanced 3D perception technology and pair that with a complex route-planning system… so changes to the environment, like a misplaced box or a person walking through a warehouse don’t cause the automation to shut down. Instead, the automation responds in a safe and intelligent way.
Shared autonomy is a way to multiply human potential. It marries the best of automated robotics and human critical thinking. Most of the time, our automation performs automatically. As we said, it is adaptive. But adaptive automation can’t account for extreme edge cases or scenarios that haven’t been encountered before. This is where shared autonomy comes in. When our automated robot encounters a challenge that it isn’t sure how to handle, it can “ask a question” to an operator. That operator is seated in a climate controlled room in front of a software-based interface and can give the machine guidance on how to solve a challenge. That operator can also remotely operate the robot from that control station. Because the automation does not require continuous operation, a single operator can manage 10 or more robots at a time.
Continuous learning means that, while our system is robust on day 1, it will be even more robust on day 100. That’s because every time a robot asks for guidance on a challenging task, it learns how to solve that task on its own the next time. But it’s even better than that, because the robot isn’t just being trained by the operator guidance on site, the robot can benefit from guidance being given to any Third Wave-enabled robot at any site. Over time, this means edge case interruptions become fewer and fewer while efficiency and safety continually increase.