Driving innovation: how our digital twin initiative with NVIDIA and SoftServe enhances material handling
In the rapidly evolving world of robotics and automation, Toyota Material Handling Europe is taking bold steps to accelerate the speed of innovation and reduce Time-to-Market. In collaboration with NVIDIA and SoftServe – a premier IT consulting and digital services provider and global leader in Physical AI solutions – we are piloting development and deployment of Physical AI solutions. At the heart of this transformation is a groundbreaking digital twin solution for simulating Toyota forklifts in a virtual environment of warehouses and factories.
Solving real-world challenges with Physical AI
One of the important challenges in robotics is the ability to simulate real-world scenarios with high fidelity. Traditional testing methods are often slow, expensive, and limited in scope. Recognising these challenges, we collaborated with SoftServe and NVIDIA to create a virtual copy of autonomous forklifts, enabling precise simulation and analysis across diverse operational conditions in digital twins built using the NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform of APIs, SDKs, and services that enable developers to easily integrate OpenUSD and RTX rendering technologies.
This digital twin approach bridges the gap between design and deployment, empowering validation and optimisation of our robotic systems in a controlled, scalable and cost-effective environment, which enables faster Time-to-Market and higher quality.
“Developing digital twin applications with Omniverse allows us to replicate and explore various testing environments in a way that is very hard to do in the real world, without actually going to the customer’s site,” says Johan Brynås, Director Research & Innovation at Toyota Material Handling Europe.
“We can, for example, train and virtually test Physical AI solutions on an unlimited number of different sites. We can also do a lot of the actual system commissioning in the digital twin, minimising the disturbance of customer operations when going live. This truly allows us to increase our speed of innovation”.
Johan Brynås
Director Research & Innovation at Toyota Material Handling Europe
Enhancing human-robot collaboration through simulation
One of the key use cases for this solution is collaborative case picking, where pickers and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are working together, raising overall efficiency.
This use case is especially interesting from a simulation perspective as it incorporates interaction between humans and the AMRs, when picking up a pallet, or when moving around the vehicles which affects LiDAR scanners, cameras and other sensors. Human avatars do the picking and interact with the vehicle in a realistic way.
With the help of the Mega NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint, an Omniverse Blueprint designed for simulating, testing, and optimising AI and robotic fleets in digital twins before real-world deployment, a full picking installation can be tested in simulation with different traffic scenarios and different order structures with the real vehicle software and AI models in the loop. This lets us tune and test the system performance to reach the targeted efficiency.
Powering the future with state-of-the-art technologies
To bring this vision to life, we collaborated with SoftServe to harness the power of cutting-edge technologies from NVIDIA’s, Omniverse platform.
This initiative is reshaping how warehouse automation systems are tested and validated before real-world deployment. The digital twin solution integrates advanced simulation software, real-time data analytics and machine learning algorithms. These technologies work in tandem to create a dynamic and interactive virtual environment where Toyota forklifts can be tested under a wide range of scenarios.
The use of high-fidelity 3D modelling and physics-based simulations ensures that the virtual twin accurately mirrors the behaviour of the physical trucks.
Looking ahead: scaling innovation through strategic collaboration
As a company, we are committed to shaping the future of logistics through continuous innovation and strong partnerships.
Our focus moving forward is on expanding the scope of digital twin simulations, deepening collaboration with technology leaders like NVIDIA and SoftServe, and streamlining the path from virtual testing to real-world deployment. By investing in scalable AI models and staying attuned to emerging trends, we aim to keep a leading position in warehouse automation and redefine industry standards for efficiency and innovation.