Henk Kiela

How self-driving vehicles help to reduce labour shortage in manufacturing, logistics and healthcare

16:30 – 17:00

While many people think that they should develop technology for self-driving vehicles themselves and that it is complex, we will demonstrate that the technology has matured. We will provide an overview of the technology readiness for self-driving vehicles. Various use and business cases will be shown from logistics, manufacturing and healthcare.

We will demonstrate that SDV’s are not about technology but about system integration on vehicle level and, more important, on customer application level by several use cases in manufacturing and hospitals. We will explain our Scalable Vehicle Technology, allowing us to provide custom SDV solutions at fair cost enabling SME’s to start working with SDV’s in internal logistics. And we will pay attention to the fact that the market is still very reluctant to adopt this proven technology and the economic loss as a result.

Henk Kiela, Ing MBA, started Probotics AGV Systems in 2013. In the past years the company developed modular mobile robot solutions for logistics of small and large goods up to 800 kg for use in the logistics of distribution centres and manufacturing companies. Since 2007 he is a part time professor in robotics at Fontys UAS. In industry he has a carrier as innovator since 1982 in various positions in Philips, ASM Fico and Stork. In 1994 he started his first company Opteq, developing ultraprecision machines for polish free cutting of free form contact lenses. This company was sold in 2010.