Hi giys,
I’m researching if robot fleets and open-rmf could be useful to my employer before pitching the idea/concept to my boss and consequently our higher ups, so they don’t get too many strange ideas.
With that said I need to tell you about the environment we are operating in. We are a pharmaceutical manufacturer from Europe. We aren’t well known outside of a pretty specific market and we are currently looking into every direction for digitalisation and digitization. We have some use cases where I think autonomous robots could help us greatly.
Since our products are produced in a clean room and we constantly deal with authorities like the fda and other equivalents we are pretty limited in what robots we could use inside of our clean rooms. I found 2 European manufacturers that claim to be certified for our kind of sterile clean room environment (did not contact them yet).
We could mostly use the robots to transport sensitive samples from our clean labs to our unclean labs or to long term sample storage. And we could use robots to distribute smaller mail from our mail room to the different departments.
From the top of my head I would say max 30-50 different routes. 3-4 robots should be sufficient for our clean room applications and I would say maybe 6-10 robots for the unclean things. So not a huge fleet.
We currently don’t have any automated doors, so we would need to install new system and we could pick a system that works with open-rmf.
And we currently don’t don’t have any digital control over our elevators, but I’m positive that we could work something out for them too.
The most critical thing is that non of our corridors are designed with robots in mind and will likely not be modified any time soon.
Also I don’t yet have any idea how items could be transfered between clean room boundaries, since the robots cannot feasably move across the borders without beeping at humans to desinfect them. So there likely needs to be some kind of transfer station potentially with a desinfect step when transferring from dirty to clean. But I don’t know how that could work or look, since some samples are temperature sensitive and cannot get too warm.
Do you have any ideas, comments, hints or opinions about my environment or the idea to use robots. Or hints for preferably European robot manufacturers that offer medical amrs.
Thanks for reading my post and sorry for waisting your time.