Vecna Robotics, a developer of pallet-handling autonomous mobile robots and workflow orchestration, announced at Pack Expo its latest innovation designed to deliver the best AMR performance in the industry.

The new Mark 3 software releasehelps warehouse, distribution and manufacturing organizations double fleet performance to improve efficiency and throughput, while continuing to exceed industry safety standards.

According to a recent Peerless Research Group industry report, 24 percent of organizations plan to implement AGV or AMR technology within the next year.

When evaluating automated material handling solutions, nearly 95 percent of respondents identified throughput as important or very important. The speed and flexibility of a pallet-handling solution is a critical factor in throughput efficiency gains.

Daniel Theobald, founder and chief innovation officer, Vecna Robotics, says: “The last 18 months had driven huge demand for AMRs like autonomous forklifts but adoption has been held up by both safety concerns and performance-driven ROI.

“This software release mitigates these concerns by unequivocally delivering the best AMR performance and safety in the industry.”

The Mark 3 software update is available today on Vecna Robotics’ robots. The release provides critical updates that deliver unprecedented performance, including:

Speed: Achieves a top speed of 3 m/s, 50 percent quicker interactions with pallet pickups, and better acceleration and deceleration times to improve average overall speed.

Free Space Reasoning: Introduces proprietary updates to best-in-class Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance to improve performance and handling in tight spaces.

Safety: Maintains the same rigorous safety standards as previous generations and complies with the American National Standards Institute B56.5 and Robotics Industries Association R15.08 safety standards.

The new software results from Vecna Robotics’ ongoing work to improve vehicle performance using data collected over time through its proprietary Pivotal orchestration engine.

Pivotal assigns work to robot fleets based on real-time demand, resource availability and proximity, and collects performance metrics from the production floor.

By using fleet data collected from performance sites over time, Vecna Robotics’ AMRs get smarter, and faster over time, while meeting and exceeding safety requirements.

Theobald adds: “Now, in addition to Vecna Robotics’ AMRs being the only self-driving forklifts equipped with path planning and obstacle avoidance, they are also the only pallet-handling AMRs that can deploy cloud-driven updates for immediate in-field performance improvements.”