ROVENSO SA

Address: EPFL Innovation Park, Building C 1015 Lausanne Switzerland

Contact: Thomas Estier email: info@rovenso.com www.rovenso.com

Year of foundation: 2014

Number of employees: 4

Keywords:

agile robotics, rover, ROV, UGV, harsh environment

Company profile:

The mission of ROVENSO is to design, manufacture and market agile robots (rovers) that preserve human life from hazardous operations in nuclear decommissioning and emergency response. ROVENSO SA is a spin-off of EPFL and is currently headquartered at EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne.

Products and services:

The use of Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for operations in harsh environment and emergency response helps to preserve human life from hazards but suffers from two critical bottlenecks:
First, current ROVs with heavy payloads (more than 100kg) are either limited in mobility or very slow. Second, there is a lack of Human-Machine Interfaces allowing to efficiently tele-operate fast ROVs in challenging terrains. Practically, that means that too often humans are still engaged in hazardous operations to get the job done. The first bottleneck is solved by ROVéo, a four-wheeled rover architecture able to easily overcome unstructured obstacles as well as vertical steps of more than 150% of its ground clearance (EPFL patent pending).

LISéo is solving the second bottleneck. This innovative control station allows to remotely drive ROVéo in challenging terrains much faster than any of its competitors. LISéo combines immersive vision with haptic interfaces to provide an ergonomic and very intuitive way of driving ROVs in rough terrain. Operators thus need less training, while considerably gaining in efficiency.