MilliTrack Uses Millimeter-Wave Radio to Give Robots Positioning Where Cameras Fail

Autonomous mobile robots are increasingly hauling materials through factories and warehouses, but most still rely on cameras and LiDAR to know where they are. Those systems falter in environments filled with dust, fog, glare, or long rows of nearly identical shelving — conditions that are hardly rare in industrial settings.

MilliTrack, a South Korean startup, is targeting that blind spot with AMR+, an add-on localization system that uses millimeter-wave radio signals rather than depending only on what a robot can see.

AMR+ does not replace an AMR's existing navigation system; it supplements it. A tracker is mounted on the robot, and small tags are placed in areas where the robot's normal SLAM localization becomes unreliable — SLAM being the technique that lets a robot build a map while tracking its own position on it. The system then offers the AMR a second, better source of position.

MilliTrack claims accuracy of 3 centimeters at 30 meters with latency under 100 milliseconds. AMR+ does not require the robot to abandon its existing LiDAR, cameras, or inertial sensors. The AMR can monitor the confidence of normal SLAM and switch to AMR+ coordinates when that confidence drops, and back again.

Because the system requires line of sight between tracker and tag, a lost link lets the robot fall back to its existing localization. This two-way handoff makes AMR+ an additional layer rather than a replacement for existing navigation hardware.