Vorwerk: Simulation and Software Development for Household Robots

Situation

Vorwerk Elektrowerke GmbH & Co. KG is a Germany-based company known for its high-quality household appliances, like vacuum cleaners and cooking machines. As a modern company open to new technologies, Vorwerk offers a few generations of vacuum cleaning robots sold worldwide. With many different markets and millions of households using those robots, there are always some unexpected and novel situations.

Problem

Despite modern and huge testing facilities for their vacuum cleaning robots, there is a daily challenge to create test for every “obscure” situation a robot can face. Therefore, Vorwerk has decided to invest in a modern simulation environment to enhance the software development and quality assurance. Their team had some experience with ROS and Gazebo - they decided to go in that direction and were looking for someone with in-depth expertise to make initial development faster. At that point in time, they reached out to Stogl Robotics to help them with the expertise critical for the project.

Solution

After a short evaluation of the existing software stack and initial simulation ideas – Stogl Robotics suggested moving immediately towards ROS 2 as a more industry-friendly and future-proof framework for developing robotics software. Stogl Robotics’ expertise in robotic simulation and control of robots was essential to making the right decisions along the development process. Furthermore, Stogl Robotics’ ability to design and integrate complex robotics software was invaluable to creating a flexible development environment and, at the same time, future-proof, containerized instances for integration into continuous integration pipelines.

Outcome

Stogl Robotics leveraged various open-source robotics software to quickly set up complex and well-integrated simulations of Vorwerk’s vacuum cleaning robots. They achieved the results that Vorwerk expected and improved the development of Vorwerk’s robotic application efficiently. Besides that, Stogl Robotics transferred much of its knowledge about robotic simulation, software design and development, and system integration to the internal Vorwerk team.