Robotic vehicles for the mobility of tomorrow

The world is look­ing to Ham­burg in Octo­ber. At the ITS World Con­gress, the focus will be on the future of mobil­i­ty. From Octo­ber 11 to 15, inno­v­a­tive solu­tions for tomor­row’s intel­li­gent trans­porta­tion sys­tems will be pre­sent­ed at the inter­na­tion­al indus­try plat­form. Con­ti­nen­tal will also be there as an exhibitor. The com­pa­ny will be show­cas­ing pio­neer­ing robot­ics tech­nolo­gies that can sup­port humans in cru­cial areas of appli­ca­tion. Three so-called AMR vehi­cles — Autonomous Mobile Robots — can be expe­ri­enced as pro­to­types at the com­pa­ny’s booth: The Con­ti­nen­tal Cor­riere is a small deliv­ery robot for trans­port­ing gro­ceries or pack­ages in urban areas. The Con­ti­nen­tal Con­tadi­no, in turn, is an agri­cul­tur­al robot that can sow, plant and fer­til­ize autonomous­ly. The third robot was devel­oped for use in intral­o­gis­tics, i.e. for sup­port in pro­duc­tion plants or logis­tics centers.

“With its appear­ance at the ITS Con­gress, Con­ti­nen­tal is show­ing that intel­li­gent mobil­i­ty does not just mean trans­port­ing peo­ple from A to B. It also means meet­ing the chal­lenges of a chang­ing world. Inno­v­a­tive mobil­i­ty also means meet­ing the chal­lenges of high­er logis­tics vol­umes, imple­ment­ing sus­tain­able ideas for the trans­port and dis­tri­b­u­tion of goods, and offer­ing smart solu­tions that sup­port resource-con­serv­ing food pro­duc­tion in agri­cul­ture. For all these areas, robot­ics appli­ca­tions are an ide­al com­ple­ment to exist­ing structures.”

- Michael Hülsewies, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent and Head of Archi­tec­ture & Software

Corriere — a delivery and transport robot for urban areas

The robot­ic vehi­cle most vis­i­ble in tomor­row’s every­day mobil­i­ty is the Con­ti­nen­tal Cor­riere. The deliv­ery robot, which weighs just under 40 kilo­grams and is around 30 cen­time­ters high, is already being test­ed in Sin­ga­pore. There, it trans­ports food from a restau­rant to Con­ti­nen­tal’s local site. In the process, essen­tial expe­ri­ence is being gath­ered for lat­er use in series production.

The vehi­cle is ide­al for use in the so-called last mile: for trans­port­ing food, med­i­cines or small­er pack­ages to the end cus­tomer. A mobil­i­ty solu­tion like the Cor­riere can sig­nif­i­cant­ly ease the bur­den on inner-city traf­fic if peo­ple no longer have to get into their cars to buy a liter of milk, a lunch pack­age or an order from the pharmacy.

The deliv­ery robot moves com­plete­ly autonomous­ly and self-suf­fi­cient­ly through the traf­fic. To do this, it is equipped with tech­nolo­gies that have already proven their worth in auto­mo­bil­i­ty. Lidar sen­sors and cam­eras, for exam­ple, which are already used in a sim­i­lar form in sys­tems for auto­mat­ed dri­ving in pas­sen­ger cars, plus self-learn­ing soft­ware make the Cor­riere an intel­li­gent par­tic­i­pant in the cityscape. It rec­og­nizes pedes­tri­ans and their direc­tion of trav­el, cross­es traf­fic lights and adapts incon­spic­u­ous­ly to the gen­er­al flow of traf­fic. This makes the Cor­riere an ide­al helper in the smart city life of tomor­row. At the ITS Con­gress, Con­ti­nen­tal will also be pre­sent­ing a cen­tral fleet man­age­ment sys­tem that can be used to intel­li­gent­ly oper­ate a swarm of robot vehi­cles in large-scale operations.