Full Demo: How Cyngn's Industrial Autonomous Vehicles Operate.

Transcript:

My name is Jordan Stern, I'm the Director of Products at Cyngn. We're going to be introducing you to our Enterprise Autonomy Suite, which is Cyngn’s suite of products that helps bring autonomous vehicle solutions to industrial companies.

It's very exciting today because I’m going to walk you through the different components of the Enterprise Autonomy Suite, which includes the software that actually drives the vehicles themselves, but then our support and components software that does things like fleet management provides analytics to businesses. All an effort to allow for increases in efficiency in the commercial and industrial landscapes, as well as safety and advancement of technology implementation.

So the first thing that I'm going to introduce you guys today is our Command Center and our Fleet Management System and analytics products. So if you follow me into the Command Center, I'll show you how people remotely control their fleet of autonomous vehicles when they use the enterprise autonomous suite.

So a big part of the Enterprise Autonomy Suite that we offer here at Cyngn is Cyngn Insights. And what Cyngn Insights really is, it's the capability to not only manage your fleet of vehicles through Fleet Management systems and mission planners, which I'm going to show here in a second but also to absorb and interact with the data that these vehicles produce and understand the impact that they may be having on your operation.

So what we're showing you here today in our Command Center is both of those sides of the coin. How can you manage fleets remotely by using our Fleet Management System and Mission Planner System, as well as our remote monitoring capabilities? And how can you observe the data that the vehicles are feeding back to your operations so that you can make operational efficiency?

Obviously, we're here in a nice beautiful command center in HQ. You can imagine that you can set something like this up for more remote operations if you're controlling vehicles and suites that are in remote areas. But this can also be set up in an office that's at your headquarters or at your logistics facility or your manufacturing facility.

So if you join me over here for a little bit, we can understand a little bit about what we're looking at. So you can see here on the left, we have our core Fleet Management System. This is how you may send missions out to vehicles and make sure that they're going and doing the work that they need to do. We're going to go through that in a second. I'm actually going to display how we plan a mission and launch it. But first, I also want to show you two other tools that we provide in Cyngn Insights as a part of the Enterprise Economy Suite.

The first here is a remote monitoring capability and remote control. So the ability to not only control but view the vehicles that you have in your fleet from a remote location can offer a lot of things. You can understand why they may be having an issue or why they're blocked if they're operating in a remote region or a remote part of your facility so that you don't necessarily have to send personnel out to fix an issue if there is one. Obviously, remote controls allow you to control that vehicle from a distance as well.

But we love to highlight the data aspect of what our vehicles provide. Not only do they give primary data talking about throughputs and cycle times and how well you're manufacturing and how often you're delivering the product that you're making or the material that you're trying to deliver, but it can also give you secondary insights into patterns that may be emerging at your facility that help you make operational and efficiency gains.

So those are the core components of Cyngn Insights. There's the data, there's the remote monitoring, and there's the Fleet Management.

So to get us into the next part of our demonstration, we're going to show you a little bit about the Fleet management aspect and how somebody at your company may manage the autonomous vehicles that you have on-site, and how they would go about doing that and plan missions and things of that nature.

So there are a couple of different ways that you can plan missions with our Fleet Management System. What we're going to show you today is the saved mission functionality because we love the fact that it's one click and go type of functionality.

So if you're here on your Fleet Management System and you click into the appropriate vehicle that's at your work site, you can go to plan a mission and you'll see that there are two options here. There are saved missions and there are new missions. So you can see here we have a bunch of saved missions for the vehicles that are out in our HQ testing route that we've deployed in the past. And like I said before, it is as simple as one click and go and deploy, and you select a mission and you deploy it.

Now, that mission has been sent through the cloud to our vehicle and it's been loaded onto the vehicle. And we're going to head out there right now and I'm going to show you a little bit more about how DriveMod works. And then we're going to send this vehicle off to do some work. So let's go.

All right, so we're back here in our testing area. Before I jump into the next part of our demonstration, I'm going to introduce another member of our team. This is Azalea. She's a Product Manager here at Cyngn. She's going to be helping us out a little bit, showing us how we do work with some of these vehicles.

So when we were in the Command Center, we showed you the mission planner and the Fleet Management System. And we showed how you plan a mission, you dictate what stops the vehicle is going to go to and how you send that mission out to the vehicle itself. So that mission is now on this vehicle. But before we send it off to do its work, I'm going to walk you through the components of the DriveMod Kit.

So you can see we have a Columbia stockchaser here, which is a fantastic vehicle partner of ours. And we have the DriveMod Kit on top of the stockchaser. The DriveMod Kit is what houses many of the core hardware components that allow the vehicle to run by itself. So that's both the sensor packages as well as the compute and some of the other control components that we utilize.

The first and most important one is this LiDAR we have here. And this LiDAR is what allows us to utilize the top two tiers of our perception stack, which are our model-based detection and existence-based detection. That is what allows our vehicle to understand the objects that are out in the world around it so then we can talk about how to navigate around them and make sure that we're doing a good job of operating safely.

That both include being able to detect things like people, but also just being able to tell that there are obstructions in the way. So those are the top two tiers of our perception stack. The third tier of our perception stack is what we call virtual bumper. Virtual bumper is supported by a couple of the sensors that we have at the front of the vehicle. And virtual bumper is a redundant sensor and compute package that we have on the vehicle that allows us to have an extra layer of safety.

So in the event that something occurs in the environment that either is unexpected or unsafe, we want to make sure that we have redundancy built into the vehicle that we guarantee that we stop in a safe way. So that's what virtual bumper is.

So we have our three-tier perception stack which allows us to operate safely and for the vehicle to understand what's going on in the world outside there. But we also have features that are specifically designed to translate that operation of the vehicle to the people that are working with it so that they can work with it safely. And one of the key features in that package is this LED lighting system that you can see on the vehicle.

You can see that the lights are green right now and green indicates a state that we've defined as the “Safe Vehicle Workspace state”, which means that when the lights are green, it's safe for an operator in the field or one of your employees to interact with a vehicle in some way.

There are a couple of other light packages that you'll see in different parts of the demonstration. Blue is one that indicates the vehicle driving autonomously and red indicates an error state. And then there are a couple of different lighting systems that we can display to indicate that there's an obstacle that's blocking the vehicle.

Now that we've walked through those different components, we can kind of get into how this vehicle does work.

So the other thing that you'll notice is we have something attached to the vehicle here. So primarily these Columbia stockchasers outfitted with the DriveMod Kit are used to transport material horizontally around different facilities and that's usually done by towing them around. What you see here is actually a product that's built by JTECH, it’s their mother-daughter cart system. The reason why we love this system is it allows our customers to detach the daughter cart, take it out throughout their environment, load it up without having to detach the cart from our vehicle itself. So we're going to Azalea to demonstrate that here for you.

Now we have the cart loaded. Remember that our lighting system indicates when it's safe to interact with the vehicle. The lights are green right now, which means it's going to stop the Safe Vehicle Workspace state which means you can do things like load the vehicle and touch it and interact with it and step over the cart and come to different sides of the vehicle so that you can do what you need to do.

What we're going to do next is you can see the vehicle HMI here. And the mission that we put on the vehicle in the control center is now loaded onto the vehicle here. And the next step is to use the human-machine interface on the vehicle to send the mission off to do its work.

All right, so now that we're at our next stop, we're going to offload our product. We're going to set this aside for a second while we continue.
All right, so as I come over here to send the vehicle off on its way, we will step back to clear the vehicle workspace so that it can take off. We're going to take the time here to explain another feature in the lighting structure that we use on this vehicle. And you can kind of see it starting to work here.

When we talked to you earlier, the vehicle mobility was green, which is the Safe Vehicle Workspace mode, which is indicating it's safe to go and interact with the vehicle. The lighting feature that you're seeing now is the yellow lighting feature and that's an indication that the vehicle has observed an object or a person or something in its field of view that it is taking action for or against.

And there's a couple of different reasons why we want to have this lighting change. The first is so that the people that are in the same environment as the vehicle are aware that the vehicle is reacting to objects around them. So we want them to be aware that the vehicle noticed that they were there. We don't want them to be caught off guard, that the vehicle is approaching them.

When we give a visual signal, operators and employees that interact with these vehicles on a daily basis, have a better time working with them, are more efficient when they work with these vehicles, when they understand the decisions that they're making. Instead of it being ambiguous as to if the vehicle is stopping for an object here or there, having a light indication makes it more clear and well-known why the vehicle is doing what it's doing.

The second reason is to increase efficiency. Having a visual indication that you can see from fairly far off that this vehicle is stopped for something and it's blocked allows you to more efficiently catch those situations and remedy them, which ultimately allows for us to do more efficient work for our customers.

So, yes, there is a component of this lighting change that allows for people to better understand the vehicle's behavior, but there's also a large efficiency gain for it so that these vehicles are used in an optimized way and you're really maximizing the value that you get out of them.

All right, so we've shown you a lot today. We stepped into our contacts and we showed you Cyngn Insight, a core component of the Enterprise Economy Suite. And we've demonstrated in our testing area how DriveMod works and the different components and features that we've built for allowing these vehicles to drive by themselves.

We really enjoyed having you today. Thanks for the time.

If you're interested in hearing more about Cyngn’s Enterprise Autonomy Suite or any of its components, please don't hesitate to reach out on Cyngn.com. For now, we're going to get out of this vehicle's way so we can let it finish doing its job. It was great having you today.