Brownfield Deployment

棕地部署（存量工厂）Advanced

Putting robots into an already-built factory designed around people, instead of a purpose-built new plant.

“Brownfield” and “greenfield” are a pair of engineering terms: greenfield means building entirely from scratch, where the building and workflow can be designed around automation from day one; brownfield means retrofitting an existing building, production line, or warehouse, where space, workstations, and shelf heights were all designed for people and can't be substantially changed. Most factories are brownfield, and retrofitting them with traditional automation usually means stopping the line for expensive reconstruction. One of the main selling points of humanoid robots and general-purpose mobile manipulators is that they can adapt directly to human-built environments, taking over part of a job without redesigning the line — so whether a company's robot can run reliably in a brownfield setting is an important test of its real deployment ability.

ExampleFigure AI's 2024 partnership with BMW, placing humanoid robots into BMW's existing US factory for testing, is an example of brownfield deployment.

Also called: Brownfield (Existing-Factory) Deployment
Related: Machines Replacing Humans · Lights-Out Factory · Factory Pilot Deployment · Humanoid Robot · Real-world Deployment · Human-Robot Mixed Workforce
Sources: Figure AI - Wikipedia
Greenfield project - Wikipedia