Ubica Robotics GmbH develops autonomous scanning robots that generate daily digital twins of retail environments. Founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the University of Bremen's REFILLS research project, the company's UB5 robots operate after hours in stores across Germany, autonomously navigating retail spaces to capture, recognize, and identify furniture and inventory. The system updates 3D digital twins daily for inventory monitoring and store operations optimization. The company employs approximately 70 people and received the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award in 2022 at the European Robotics Forum in Rotterdam.
The technical implementation spans mobile robotics, autonomous navigation, computer vision for object recognition, and 3D reconstruction. The company handles hardware development and production in-house, as well as distribution and deployment. Robots currently operate in major retail chains including dm-drogerie markt. The software stack includes ROS for robot control, OpenCV and PCL for computer vision, and Halcon for machine vision tasks. Backend systems run on Azure Container Apps with Kafka for message streaming, while frontend interfaces use React and TypeScript. Development workflows use C++ and Python for robotics components, with Kotlin and Java for backend services.
The daily operational cadence - robots scanning stores every night to maintain current digital twins - creates distinct engineering requirements around autonomous navigation reliability, object recognition accuracy in variable lighting, and system uptime in production retail environments. The hardware-software boundary involves perception systems that must handle diverse retail layouts and products, with edge cases including seasonal merchandise changes and store reconfigurations.