M08-02 · AI + Robotics & Automation Operations

Robot Fleet Management and Operations

AI + Robotics & Automation Operations →

Teaches students to manage robot fleets at operational scale using fleet management dashboards, performance metrics, and shift planning that integrates robots with human workers. Covers real-time fleet monitoring (utilization, error rates, downtime), shift planning with robot capacity models, performance benchmarking, multi-site triage (red/yellow/green), SLA tracking (understanding that 95% uptime means a maximum of 36 hours downtime per month), capacity planning, and tiered support structures (L1 self-service, L2 remote diagnostics, L3 field service).

35 Hours
8 Learning objectives
Evaluate Bloom's ceiling (?)
5 Competencies

Learning Objectives

Objectives

Depth
  • Analyze fleet management dashboards to identify operational patterns — robot clustering, idle zones, charging bottlenecks, error rate spikes — and translate observations into actionable operational changes Analyze
  • Create a shift plan that integrates robot capacity (X tasks/hour x Y robots) with human worker capacity, including contingency for robot failures (plan for 85% availability, not 100%) Create
  • Apply tiered support structures (L1 customer self-service, L2 remote diagnostics, L3 field service) to categorize and route operational issues efficiently Apply
  • Evaluate fleet SLA compliance by calculating uptime percentages per robot and per site, identifying robots trending toward SLA breach, and implementing corrective action before the breach occurs Evaluate
  • Create a multi-site triage dashboard using red/yellow/green status indicators, prioritizing sites by severity and business impact Create
  • Analyze charging schedules to identify and resolve fleet-wide charging bottlenecks that create production capacity gaps during specific time windows Analyze
  • Apply fleet utilization benchmarking (target 70-85% active utilization) to identify underperforming robots and zones requiring operational adjustments Apply
  • Create a daily operational briefing (morning huddle format) synthesizing overnight fleet performance, active maintenance items, and capacity plan for the upcoming shift Create

Levels: Remember · Understand · Apply · Analyze · Evaluate · Create — highest demands most original thinking.

What You'll Master

Fleet Dashboard Interpretation

Reading real-time fleet status (map view, status panels, alert feeds), identifying patterns in utilization/error/charging data, distinguishing urgent alerts from informational notifications.

Shift Planning & Capacity Modeling

Building capacity models that account for robot throughput, human worker throughput, charging cycles, maintenance windows, and failure contingency; adjusting plans based on volume forecasts.

SLA Management

Tracking uptime against contractual SLA targets, calculating remaining downtime budget per robot/site, triggering proactive intervention when trending toward breach.

Multi-Site Operations

Triaging across multiple sites simultaneously using severity-based prioritization, managing remote vs. on-site response decisions, standardizing operational practices across locations.

Tiered Support Design

Structuring L1/L2/L3 support tiers with clear escalation criteria, decision trees, and response time targets; enabling customer self-service for common L1 issues.

What You'll Build

Fleet Operations Management Plan — Student receives fleet telemetry data for 50 robots across 3 sites (30 days of utilization, error, and charging data). They produce: a fleet performance analysis identifying the top 5 operational issues by impact, a shift plan integrating robot and human capacity with failure contingency, an SLA compliance report with risk-flagged robots, a tiered support structure with escalation decision trees, and a daily operational briefing template with sample content from the data.

Industry Tools, Not Toy Projects

Freedom Robotics / InOrbit / Formant

Fleet management platforms for real-time robot monitoring, telemetry, and operational dashboards.

WMS (Manhattan / Blue Yonder / SAP EWM)

Warehouse management systems for integrating robot operations with order fulfillment workflows.

Excel / Google Sheets

Shift planning, capacity modeling, and fleet performance analysis with structured data.

Power BI / Tableau

Fleet analytics dashboards for visualizing utilization, error rates, and SLA compliance trends.

PagerDuty

Alerting and incident management for fleet operations monitoring and escalation workflows.

Slack / Teams

Operational communication for shift handoffs, incident coordination, and cross-site collaboration.

Prerequisites

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