Unparalleled ROI for Manufacturers and Distributors

Seegrid Corporation, the premier provider of vision-guided industrial mobile robots, today announced it has launched solutions in the material handling industry aimed at delivering unparalleled ROI for manufacturers and distributors. The emergence of Seegrid in the industry provides the only industrial mobile robots with the ability to navigate their environment without magnetic tapes, guide wires or lasers.

Seegrid?s Industrial Mobile Robotics (IMR) technology provides early-stage capabilities of autonomous robot behavior with Sense, Move, Analyze, Interact and Repeat capabilities, providing a real difference from today?s AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles). The result–AGV-like competence with greater flexibility at a considerably lower cost. IMR-enabled robots provide WalkThroughThenWorkTM capabilities, providing an operator with the ability to simply and easily instruct the robot along a desired path, adding behaviors such as horns and stop stations, usually in minutes. Seegrid robots literally come straight off the truck; an operator quickly inputs the path and the robot is immediately productive.

The company, which brings together three decades of development, experience and expertise, was founded by Hans Moravec, PhD, world-renowned robotic research scientist, and Scott Friedman, MD, a highly successful software entrepreneur.

Friedman?s leadership experience and entrepreneurial energy help make Seegrid?s IMR technology a commercially available reality. Prior to Seegrid, he co-founded CareFlow|Net, an enterprise medical software company. CareFlow|Net was purchased by a division of Philips Electronics NV in 2003. Friedman has an MD from West Virginia University and a BA from the University of Michigan, Honors College.

Moravec is a former Research Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Lab at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. His academic work has been funded by, among others, the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. His books, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, 1988, and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, 1998, consider the implications of evolving robot intelligence. Moravec has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, an MSc in Computer Science from University of Western Ontario, and a BSc in Mathematics from Acadia University.

?Seegrid?s mission is to provide easy-to-deploy perceptive automation solutions that significantly reduce operating costs for manufacturers and distributors,? said Scott Friedman, President and CEO of Seegrid. ?To make this happen we needed technology to catch up with the software developed by Hans over the past 30 years. First, CPUs needed to be fast enough to do all of the calculations, then sensing chips needed to get cheap enough for the industry price point. Right now, it is the perfect storm where these elements are coming together to make this technology feasible for the material handling industry.?

Seegrid today also announced the appointment of two Board of Director members, Ray Kurzweil and Dan Shapira. Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other
orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil has received numerous awards and honors throughout his prestigious career. Ray?s website, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

Dan Shapira is a principal partner at Marcus & Shapira LLP and serves as outside corporate counsel to one of the nation?s largest private companies. He is frequently retained by companies to consult on complex commercial transactions and as lead negotiator of labor contracts for large companies. Dan has served as Deputy Attorney General and head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and was appointed the Chief of the White Collar Crime Division. Dan has received awards from the Department of Justice for Outstanding Performance and Special Achievement as well as commendations from the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.