Bridging the Gap: Unlocking Visibility Across Manual and Autonomous Fleets

Redefining Efficiency, Safety, and Insight in Material Flow Operations

Walk into any warehouse or manufacturing facility today and you’ll see a mix of people, forklift trucks, carts, autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs), and—more recently—autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). It’s a complex, dynamic, and interdependent dance of activity, where efficiency depends not only on the speed of machines but also on the safety, spatial awareness, and coordination of everything moving across the floor.

Yet beneath this dynamic surface lies a hidden challenge: data fragmentation. movement patterns, fleet utilization, traffic interactions, and human-machine workflows often exist in silos, making them difficult to measure and even harder to optimize.

The Rise of Robotics—and the Reality Check

The momentum behind warehouse robotics is undeniable. According to Skyquest, the global warehouse robotics market is set to skyrocket from $13 billion in 2024 to a staggering $53 billion by 2032. The future clearly favors hybrid fleets—where manual and autonomous systems work collaboratively.

But here’s the paradox: despite this explosive growth, adoption remains surprisingly low. A recent G2 report reveals that only 6% of U.S. warehouses currently deploy mobile robots. Why the disconnect?

Beyond Deployment: The Integration Imperative

The challenge isn’t just about placing robots on the floor—it’s about embedding them into the broader operational ecosystem. True transformation requires systems that can communicate, adapt, and evolve together.

And let’s not forget: many tasks still rely heavily on manual labor. In 2023 alone, Statista reported 34 million human-operated forklifts in retail and e-commerce, 13 million in construction, 9 million in manufacturing, and 18 million across other sectors. These manual vehicles aren’t going away any time soon.

The ability to integrate hybrid fleets is key to staying operationally at the top.

Bridging the Gap: Manual Meets Digital

The good news? Manual fleets can be part of the digital revolution. By integrating their live positions into warehouse management systems, businesses can track material flow in real time, enhance safety protocols, and unlock new levels of operational insight.

And that’s exactly where Sevensense’s Visual AI Ecosystem comes in!

Welcome to the world of interoperability—where autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), forklifts, and other types of manually operated vehicles, fleet management systems (FMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are no longer siloed but connected.

It is more than just a localization and navigation technology—it’s a solution built to unify manual and autonomous traffic workflows, seamlessly integrating data streams into FMS, WMS, and ERP systems.

Unlocking Operational Visibility

Equipping both autonomous and manually operated vehicles with advanced Visual SLAM and AI-powered perception creates a unified layer of spatial awareness.

It’s a busy afternoon in the warehouse. Orders for same-day delivery are piling up, and speed is everything.

Erik, a forklift driver, is unloading pallets of mixed goods from a truck at the dock. At the same time, a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) is carrying smaller totes to picking stations deeper in the warehouse.

Normally, this overlap between human and robot traffic creates friction. Forklift drivers worry about suddenly meeting an AMR in a cross-aisle; AMRs sometimes freeze to avoid collisions, causing traffic jams. Everyone loses time.

But today is different.

Both Erik and the AMRs share the same map of the warehouse, with live position data of each of the vehicles. As he drives toward a cross-aisle with her loaded pallet, his forklift automatically updates its position and intended route. An AMR, scheduled to cross the same spot seconds later, receives the update instantly. Instead of halting, it slows down and reroutes slightly, giving Erik priority. Behind the scenes, the fleet management system spreads nearby AMRs across other aisles to avoid congestion.

Meanwhile, Amira, the warehouse operations manager, is following the flow. Her dashboard gives her a live view of every vehicle — autonomous and manual. She doesn’t just see positions; she sees utilization metrics: which forklifts are running the longest, how far they’ve traveled, and which AMRs are spending too much time idle between tasks.

She notices Erik’s forklift has already logged more engine hours and kilometers this week than average. The system automatically flags it for preventative maintenance earlier than planned — not based on a fixed schedule, but on real usage data. At the same time, one AMR shows a higher amount of idle time compared to the rest of the fleet. Amira reallocates its tasks immediately, ensuring a balanced workload across the fleet.

The result? Humans and robots move in sync on the warehouse floor, while operation managers like Amira can orchestrate the bigger picture — safety, efficiency, and asset longevity — from one shared source of truth.

Behind it all is Sevensense’s Visual AI ecosystem, turning every movement in the warehouse into shared spatial awareness that serves operators, machines, and managers alike.

The Alphasense product line

The Visual AI Ecosystem addresses this challenge through the Alphasense product line, each designed to extend operational visibility to different parts of the fleet:

• Alphasense Position equips AGVs and other types of wheeled vehicles with multi-camera, industrial-grade Visual SLAM, providing accurate 3D positioning. This not only enables reliable navigation but also generates location data that can be fed back into management systems for performance tracking and optimization.
• Alphasense Autonomy builds on Alphasense Position’s capabilities by combining Visual SLAM with AI-driven 3D perception and navigation, giving robots the ability to adapt to complex and dynamic environments—while continuously generating valuable operational insights.
• Alphasense Tracker: extends visibility to manually operated vehicles, such as forklifts, tuggers, and other types of industrial trucks. By transforming their movement into digital data streams, it ensures that human-driven assets are no longer blind spots, but active contributors to fleet-wide situational awareness.

Together, these solutions create a single data environment where all vehicles —manual or autonomous—are visible, measurable, and manageable.

From Positioning to Insight: Redefining What’s Visible—and What’s Possible

By unifying spatial awareness across fleets, the Visual AI Ecosystem enables the ability to go beyond automation. It unlocks operational visibility, ensures that every movement generates usable data, and provides the foundation for smarter, data-driven decision-making.

The Visual AI Ecosystem is giving organizations the insight they need to improve the way they work continuously. Holistic floor traffic orchestration is not just about moving goods or materials faster. Merging manual and autonomous workflows into a single connected ecosystem is driving impactful outcomes across the board:

• For Operations & Process Optimization Leaders

Congestion, bottlenecks, and downtime erode efficiency in both warehouses and factories. With real-time vehicle tracking, traffic heatmaps, spaghetti diagrams, and predictive flow analytics, leaders gain the visibility to act on hidden inefficiencies. 

They can redesign layouts, optimize pick paths, and streamline material handling to reduce costs and cut lead times. By connecting both manual and autonomous fleets into one data layer, they can also schedule maintenance based on actual usage, right-size their fleet, and balance workloads across shifts. The result is not just incremental improvement but a sustained boost in throughput, asset utilization, and cost efficiency.

• For Safety & Compliance Leaders

The Visual AI Ecosystem delivers collision prevention and hazard detection across mixed fleets, addressing one of the biggest risks in industrial environments: human–machine interaction. With accurate vehicle tracking, safe-speed enforcement, and pedestrian proximity alerts, safety managers can reduce lost-time injuries, lower insurance claims, and ensure regulatory compliance. 

Beyond compliance, the system creates a culture of proactive safety, where risks are anticipated and neutralized before incidents occur. This doesn’t just simplify safety and compliance audits—it transforms safety from a cost center into a competitive advantage by minimizing downtime and protecting the workforce.

• For OEMs & Equipment Integrators

The challenge isn’t just making equipment smarter—it’s making it scalable, interoperable, and differentiable. Sevensense provides OEM-ready, vehicle-agnostic camera kits with open interfaces, enabling manufacturers to embed infrastructure-free indoor positioning, collision avoidance, and analytics-ready data streams directly into forklifts, AMRs, and AGVs. 

This accelerates time-to-market while unlocking new revenue opportunities: predictive maintenance, fleet optimization services, and safety-as-a-feature. By integrating with FMS, WMS, and ERP systems, OEMs and integrators can deliver not just machines, but connected solutions that redefine customer value, future-proofing their offerings against the rising demand for mixed-fleet automation.

The Visual AI Ecosystem doesn’t just connect machines. It connects people, processes, and data— unlocking entirely new layers of visibility, new dimensions of insight, and the possibilities they enable.

The outcome: safer workplaces, faster flows, and human-centric automation that scales with trust.

Get in touch, let’s talk about how you can benefit from the Visual AI Ecosystem!

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