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The Waku founders have built a mobile robotics consulting company that evolved to include software development. | Credit: Waku Robotics

Germany robotics software company Waku Robotics closed a seed round of $1.64M (€1.5M).  New investors include Schauenburg Ventures, Plug and Play, Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen (TGFS),  Bito Campus and London-based proptech VC Pi Labs. Agilox founder Franz Humer and Hans-Jürgen Cramer are also participating in the round. The company was founded in late 2019, and currently has less than 20 employees.

Heterogeneous mobile robot fleet management

The company is a robotics consulting and software development organization. Its marquee software solution is Waku Sense, designed for the optimal operation of mobile robots within logistics and manufacturing. This fleet management software is vendor independent and offers fleet analytics and control of a heterogeneous fleet of mobile robots.

WAKU Sense orchestrates all robot systems in order to optimally utilize all resources in the system and is manufacturer independent to easily support any machine in the future. If a robot currently isn’t in the system, Waku will integrate it into the Waku Sense solution.

Waku Robotics Control Center enables fleet management for heterogeneous fleets of mobile robots operating within your organization. | Credit: Waku Robotics

“With their offering, WAKU Robotics complements our Ventures portfolio in the focus area of Robotics perfectly,” explains Malvine Komorek, Investment Manager of Schauenburg Ventures. “We can now cover the entire Automation Journey: WAKU Robotics supports companies in the selection, procurement and operationalisation of mobile robots with existing solutions in the market. This participation is thus a valuable extension to NODE Robotics, which is starting at an advanced point in the automation value chain: the autonomous control of existing, autonomously driving robots. This results not only in synergy effects in the Ventures portfolio with each other, but especially for our core portfolio, which is facing the automation challenge.”

Find your next mobile robot here

The company also developed and maintains an independent comparison platform for mobile robots called LotsOfBots. The site has an intuitive user search interface and features data about each of the individual robot vehicles.

On of Waku Robotics innovations is to compile and present a searchable online database of mobile robots. | Credit: Waku Robotics

The LotsOfBots online interface helps potential users of mobile robots to browse or search the market for mobile robots. The interactive user interface makes it easy to quickly narrow the field of potential solutions. The database includes both autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and automatic guided vehicles (AGVs). The company continues to update the database with new robots as they come to market.

The company also offers consulting for clients just starting their robotics automation journey. They offers services to help evaluate logistics workflows within an organization and then select and deploy the solutions. The LotsOfBots site grew out of building their own internal database of mobile robots for client projects.

As part of its consulting practice the company produced a robot operations best practices for mobile robots. This content is free to download from the website, and is a good place to start if you are evaluating your needs for a mobile robot.