Adept Technology Introduced New Autonomous Indoor Vehicles at SEMICON West 2012

Automated SMIF Pod Transporter Uses Industry Event to Demonstrate Its Ability to Navigate in Peopled-Areas Without Infrastructure
Adept Technology, Inc., a leading provider of intelligent robots and autonomous mobile solutions, demonstrated their new Autonomous Indoor Vehicles (AIVs) for the automated-transport of SMIF pods at the SEMICON West 2012 show. The industry event took place from July 10 to 12 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

The new products for transporting and handling SMIF pods, the Adept SPC-4200™ and Adept SPH-2200™, navigate their environment using Adept Motivity™. Adept Motivity is a comprehensive suite of sensors and vehicle controls used by Adept’s AIVs for self-navigation, and include functions like mapping, path-planning, and safety with no need for facility modification. Adept Motivity is key to what makes Adept AIVs different from traditional automated guided vehicles (AGVs) by delivering infrastructure-free navigation to those wishing to deploy and manage automated material handling systems.

“Adept is excited to be returning to the SEMICON West show and introduce our newest models of mobile transporters to semiconductor and clean tech professionals attending SEMICON West 2012,” says Rush LaSelle, vice president and general manager of mobile robots. “We are already receiving a tremendous response to our latest products as they are delivering labor reduction and improved yield for semiconductor foundries and look forward to creating greater product awareness throughout the market”.

The Adept SPC-4200 is a safe and autonomous indoor vehicle for delivering SMIF pods within existing or new semiconductor fabs with no additional infrastructure or dedicated space required. The underlying Motivity technology allows our platforms to move nimbly within narrow aisles and crowded environments without disruptions to daily operations during installation and maintenance.

The Adept SPH-2200 is a fully mechanized autonomous indoor vehicle used for exchanging SMIF pods from a variety of stations, including processing equipment, stockers, and storage racks.

SMIF pod movement is initiated by integrating the Adept Enterprise Manager software with a facility’s production software system to distribute transport requests across the fleet of mobile transports. The system improves yield by automatically moving and placing pods from one machine to another with reduced vibration and handling, thereby, reducing the number of particles generated by human activity and increasing operational efficiency by tracking Work-In-Progress and re-applying expensive labor from handling goods to higher-value tasks.

The SPC-4200 and SPH-2200 mobile transporters enable a more efficient use of human capital and near infinite flexibility in the movement of goods, which are key tenants in “Lean methodology”. Lean has been embraced across a broad range of industries, including in the clean tech space, as a way to preserve value with less work. Eliminating waste along the value stream means creating processes that require less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to distribute products and services with less costs and fewer defects. The Adept SPC-4200 and SPH-2200 address three primary contributors of waste associated with the manual handling of materials (transport, motion, and waiting) by automatically moving goods safely and reliably within any operating environment.

Learn more about the new autonomous indoor vehicles at www.adept.com

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