IMDA partners Mandai Wildlife Group to drive digital transformation in autonomous mobile robots, sustainability and immersive experience through ‘Living Lab for Innovation’

1. To spur digital transformation and innovation within Singapore’s wildlife parks, IMDA and Mandai Wildlife Group will forge a two-year strategic partnership to co-develop innovative solutions for commercial deployment starting with three key areas – Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), sustainability and immersive experience. IMDA and Mandai Wildlife Group signed a Memorandum of Intent (MOI) at Singapore Zoo today to work on collaborative projects in these key areas and establish Mandai Wildlife Group’s parks as a ‘living lab for innovation’.

2. The collaboration will also facilitate the development of innovative solutions to address current market gaps and challenges, advance proven use cases for industry-wide adoption, and allow other enterprises to adopt these solutions for productivity and sustainability gains, while providing opportunities to trial and validate new solutions and use cases in the wildlife parks.

3. The MOI builds on ongoing efforts between IMDA and Mandai Wildlife Group under IMDA’s Open Innovation Platform to launch innovation challenges, and use of the PIXEL Innovation Hub to showcase its innovative solutions, to inspire more corporates to innovate.

4. Ms Belina Lee, Deputy CEO, Transformation and Growth, Mandai Wildlife Group said, “As the operator of the Singapore’s integrated nature and wildlife destination, we face unique operational challenges that often go beyond the capabilities of existing market solutions. This collaboration with IMDA is an exciting opportunity to address our needs, and very importantly serve as a catalyst to drive industry creativity and innovation, paving the way for pioneering solutions to be created for immersive guest experiences, operational excellence as well as world-class animal care.”

Unlocking possibilities for outdoor deployment of AMRs

5. To kickstart the partnership, IMDA and Mandai Wildlife Group will embark on a Call for Proposal for outdoor AMRs deployment enabled with tele-operations. The Call for Proposal aims to address current industry challenges and technology gaps and support further development of advanced tech solutions. IMDA and Mandai Wildlife Group have jointly identified four use cases:

• Centralised operations
  A centralised operations platform, enabled with tele-ops, to manage and operate multiple AMRs to be deployed across park premises.
• F&B delivery
  Delivery of meals to staff across park premises and F&B delivery to visitors within the parks with purchases made through its visitor app.
• Concierge (visitor management)
  Automate and streamline services, such as location/path finding and ticket purchases, to provide an enhanced and more seamless guest experience across the wildlife parks.
• Surveillance
  Address challenges faced by security and park operations personnel who patrol dimly lit and undulating terrains across park premises, as well as enhance staff’s response time to guests’ needs and/or emergency incidents within the shortest possible time.

6. Current AMRs in the marketplace are typically designed for flat road or concrete pavements. There are currently many challenges for existing AMRs to traverse a complex outdoor environment such as uneven terrains and areas exposed to varying weather conditions. The solutions developed through the Call for Proposal will enable wider industry adoption of AMRs and unlock more possibilities for deployment. For example, developing AMRs with navigational technologies that can overcome the challenge of navigating pathways and avoid obstacles such as oncoming vehicles, as well as for effective deployment in outdoor spaces such as parks and resorts.

IMDA’s larger efforts to enable large-scale deployment of AMRs for commercial use

7. IMDA’s partnership with Mandai Wildlife Group is part of larger efforts to collaborate with enterprises to enable large-scale deployment of AMRs for commercial use. To drive adoption and deployment of AMR systems, IMDA will play a catalyst role by bringing ecosystem players together to address future demands. This is done through collaborations in commercial pilots with enterprise users, technology partners and the wider AMR community. IMDA also drives interoperability through industry adoption of a common middleware and development of new capabilities to achieve seamless operation of multiple autonomous systems in both indoor and outdoor spaces.

8. Widescale commercial adoption of AMRs in outdoor spaces will lead to greater benefits for enterprises. AMRs reduce the need for human intervention for manual or repetitive tasks to improve productivity. This helps to free up resources through enabling our workforce to take on higher value, more productive jobs. The proliferation of autonomy across a wide range of functions and purposes will have great potential in enabling opportunities for businesses in Singapore.

9. For more information, please visit Call for Proposals - Outdoor AMRs Deployment enabled with Tele-Operations.