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Kollmorgen and OTTO Motors today announced their strategic technical collaboration. | Credit: Otto Motors

Today, Kollmorgen and OTTO Motors made the announcement that they are entering into a strategic technical collaboration. The partnership between the two companies is a significant step forward for the autonomous material handling business.

Kollmorgen and OTTO Motors have partnered up with the intention of providing new applications for autonomous vehicles to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system integrators who are working to improve the efficiency of material handling for end-users in various sectors around the world. The two businesses are working to investigate the potential of their combined talents to deliver cutting-edge solutions to their joint customer base.

OTTO Motors brings over fifteen years of robotics experience and 4+ million production hours developing and deploying autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). This includes large-scale deployments to the world’s most recognized brands, including GE and Toyota.

“As the autonomous material handling market matures, customers will expect all vehicles in their fleet to be intelligent machines,” said Matt Rendall, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of OTTO Motors. “We’re excited to cooperate with Kollmorgen to bring our AMR technology to vehicles of all shapes and sizes.”

For over 50 years, Kollmorgen’s NDC Platform has provided superior vehicle automation solutions for automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and mobile robots. Through its ecosystem of OEM and System Integrator partners, Kollmorgen has deployed tens of thousands of advanced self-driving vehicles for a variety of applications worldwide, making it the industry standard.

“We see a lot of things happening in the market, where interoperability amongst other things is a strong driving force, opening up for new perspectives and collaborations,” said Tobias Byfeldt, Vice President & General Manager Kollmorgen Automation. “We are impressed with OTTO Motors’ offering and are excited to see what a collaboration between our two companies could mean and the value it could bring to our customers.”

Kollmorgen and OTTO Motors are well-positioned to lead the mobile robot business for decades by providing cutting-edge solutions to customers globally.