Cyngn-Arauco Deal Tackles Labor Shortage With Driverless Forklifts

If you can’t get people to take certain jobs that need to be done, then the next best thing is accomplishing the tasks without a human doing the work. That’s become increasingly important in the logistics industry which moves goods in, through and out of warehouses.

That growing need is money for Menlo Park, Calif.-base Cyngn which can install its autonomous technology in newly-built material moving vehicles like forklifts and tuggers or retrofit existing units.

The company announced Tuesday it just landed a major partnership with Arauco, a global leader in the furniture and construction industry that supplies products for large brands including IKEA and Sauder Woodworking.

Under the deal Cyngn will deploy 100 of its autonomous forklifts at Arauco facilities with the the production rollout set to begin in early 2024.

Describing Cyngn as a software as a service (SaaS) company, CEO Lior Tal explained the heart of its system is the Enterprise Autonomy Suite. It includes DriveMod (autonomous vehicle system), Cyngn Insight (customer-facing suite of AV fleet management, teleoperation and analytics tools) and Cyngn Evolve, an internal toolkit that enables leveraging data from the field for artificial intelligence, simulation, and modeling.

In short, Tal described DriveMod as a sort of ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool using a combination of 3D-Lidar sensors and sophisticated software that can accurately process and understand a facility’s layout and make smart and safe decisions based on information gleaned from a thorough analysis of the location.

It all adds up to autonomous technology that’s actually smarter than its predecessors, which Tal describes as just obstacle avoidance systems.

“In a facility some areas are permitted for other vehicles like forklifts, some are not,” Tal explained in an interview. “Somewhere you know, you need to drive slower because there’s a higher volume of people movement that right? So we ingest all that information. Now the system has a foundation of understanding the context of what the vehicle has to do. Now, once the vehicle is deployed into that facility, it uses the lidars and other sensors to localize itself and now it knows where it is in the environment. It receives the mission from our fleet management system that tells it what it needs to do.”

That increased autonomous intelligence fit the needs of Arauco, a multi-billion dollar company that operates thousands of vehicles in dozens of facilities, Tal said, because “The ability to identify their unique pallets to be able to stack, all that is something that in few short months the team developed demonstrated to them and led to them understanding that you know, it fits our needs.”

Announcement of the deal with Arauco comes less than two weeks after Cyngn said it integrate DriveMod into the fleet of heavy load tow vehicles, or tuggers, built by Canadian company Motrec International Inc.

“We are excited to bring DriveMod to our tuggers, enhancing our ability to deliver long-lasting products that will take productivity to the next level,” said Motrec President and CEO Blair McIntosh in a statement.

More logistics companies have been attracted to self-driving vehicles not only to address a labor shortage exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, but over safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness concerns.

“A company that that has hundreds of vehicles in the facilities, they have dozens of facilitators multiple of these retailers in the U.Ss alone,” explained Cyngn’s Lior Tal. “Their ability to reduce the workforce there to maybe a shift supervisor that can look at a few dozens of vehicles allows the system to still have a person looking at what’s happening and being able to intervene. But suddenly you’re dropping the cost per vehicle on an annual basis by then of thousands of dollars.”

One company that’s addressed all those issues is reducing human involvement in a different way. Silicon Valley-based Phantom Auto equips forklifts and yard trucks with technology that allows them to be operated remotely by a person sitting at a console anywhere in the world.

A single operator can manage several different vehicles at multiple locations meaning warehouse operators can hire individuals to run their vehicles who may not want to relocate, thereby helping to solve the dearth of local seekers.

Cyngn CEO Lior Tal says his company’s autonomous technology is “vehicle agnostic” but does that also include passenger vehicles?

“The answer is yes, maybe at some point,” replied Tal, “but at the moment our real our focus is on logistics manufacturing distribution in these industrial applications and the other thing is that problem also becomes smaller over time, components become better, infrastructure becomes communication becomes better. So by the time we decide if we want to do that the problem might be smaller to take on.”