Vulcanexus supports RISES in bringing safer autonomous forklifts to smart warehouses

Within the European ARISE project, RISES demonstrates how Vulcanexus and eProsima middleware technologies can support real-world industrial robotics applications, helping autonomous forklifts operate safely and efficiently alongside human workers.

ARISE is a European initiative focused on making industrial Human-Robot Interaction more accessible, cost-effective, and trustworthy for sectors such as healthcare, intra-logistics, and manufacturing. Through its FSTP experiments, different projects are developing practical use cases that explore how open middleware, reusable robotics components, and human-centric design can accelerate the adoption of advanced automation in Europe.

One of these projects is RISES: Robotics Integration for Smart Efficiency and Safety, a project focused on safe, efficient, and flexible automation for modern warehouse environments.

What is RISES about?

RISES addresses one of the key challenges in warehouse automation: enabling autonomous forklifts to work safely in shared spaces where people, vehicles, goods, and dynamic obstacles coexist.

Led by SLAPStack Gmb, the project focuses on deploying robotic forklifts with advanced Human-Robot Interaction and AI systems to improve safety, operational efficiency, and flexibility in dynamic block-storage warehouses. Its demonstrator combines autonomous forklifts, LiDAR-based perception, geofencing, AI-driven warehouse optimization, and real-time monitoring.

In this type of environment, reliable communication is essential. A forklift may need to distinguish between known map elements, temporary obstacles, and human presence, while safety alerts, fleet coordination, and monitoring dashboards must remain synchronised in real time.

How Vulcanexus fits into RISES

RISES uses Vulcanexus Jazzy as the main deployment environment for its ARISE nodes, providing a DDS-native foundation for communication between distributed robotic and monitoring components. This helps the project move away from MQTT-style or custom translation approaches and toward a more standardised, scalable, and interoperable architecture.

Through the eProsima DDS Enabler, ROS 2 and DDS topics can be bridged directly to Orion-LD as NGSI-LD entities, making robot and safety information available for real-time analytics, dashboards, alerts, and historical monitoring.

What eProsima technologies provide

Beyond Vulcanexus, RISES integrates several eProsima technologies to support communication robustness and scalability, including DDS Router, DDS Enabler, Discovery Server and DDS Keys, with Fast DDS serving as the main middleware. These tools help connect AGV-local networks with remote servers, improve discovery in larger deployments, and organise data efficiently in multi-AGV scenarios.

For the RISES architecture, this means more reliable data exchange between the autonomous forklift, safety modules, fleet-management systems, and industrial monitoring layers. It also supports a cleaner separation between reusable safety components and project-specific warehouse logic.

A real use case for interoperable robotics

The RISES demonstrator has been validated through a hybrid setup combining physics-based warehouse simulation and controlled real-world testing with a physical forklift. The project has reached TRL 6, demonstrating the system in a relevant environment with real hardware and extensive simulation.

Its evaluation includes obstacle detection, geofencing, safety mechanisms, route validation, real-time alerts, emergency-stop behaviour, and system-state visualisation. These capabilities show how interoperable robotics middleware can support safer and more transparent automation in shared industrial spaces.

Supporting safer, more flexible logistics

RISES is a strong example of how open middleware and industrial robotics technologies can contribute to safer, more flexible warehouse operations. By combining SLAPStack’s AI-driven logistics platform with Vulcanexus-based communication and FIWARE, the project creates a foundation for autonomous forklifts that can better understand their surroundings, react to changing conditions, and provide clear information to human operators.

For eProsima, RISES showcases how Vulcanexus and DDS-based technologies can support real industrial robotics deployments, helping bridge the gap between robot-side intelligence and enterprise-level monitoring systems.

For the ARISE ecosystem and the companies behind RISES, the project demonstrates how reusable, interoperable, and human-centric robotics components can accelerate the adoption of automation in logistics, not by removing people from the process, but by making shared human-robot environments safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.