The co-founder and former CEO of a local autonomous trucking startup has shifted gears to take the helm of a firm that is developing robotics-based material handling solutions for manufacturing and warehousing facilities.
Çetin Meriçli, who led Lawrenceville-based Locomation Inc. until shortly after it reduced operations and laid off most of its staff last February, announced he assumed the role as CEO for Atlas Robotics, a startup that is now based in Pittsburgh with about a dozen employees between its headquarters here and in Istanbul, Turkey.
His brother, Tekin Meriçli, also joined the firm as its chief technology officer. Both men have served as co-founders of Atlas since 2017 following an initial investment they made into the company at the time.
And while his time with Locomation is over — Jones Day announced it advised Locomation on the sale of "substantially all of its assets, including vehicles, software and intellectual property" last April — Çetin Meriçli said that many of the problems Locomation looked to solve will continue to be challenges for Atlas to pursue solutions to in the years ahead. It'll do so with machines the size of forklifts, though, unlike the Class 8 semi-trucks that got Locomation's self-driving tech.
"As we ended our Locomation chapter and we were looking to pick what we wanted to do next, we reassessed the material handling landscape," Meriçli said in an interview with Pittsburgh Inno. "We looked at this opportunity and we got extremely excited about the potential here so we decided to step in."
The Artificial Intelligence Guided Vehicles (AIGV) from Atlas plan to rival Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) in spaces suited for manufacturing or warehouse-based logistics handling.
Atlas' LeVO Series AIGV flagship product relies on AI algorithms to do this, yielding the robot multi-modal semantic understandings of the space it is operating in, which Atlas said allows for more "human-like decisions" to be made autonomously by the robot.
Sütaş Group, a Turkish company that produces various milk-based products like yogurt and cheese, is listed on Atlas' website as one of its current customers.
Meriçli said he's looking forward to building the company's U.S.-based team out of Pittsburgh, though he declined to provide specific figures on how many people Atlas plans to hire in the coming months at this time. Investment fundraising efforts will also come "in due time," he said.
"Really, we are looking to change the way we are moving indoor logistic operations for goods, and we're hoping to bring nothing but our expansive experience now that both me and my brother have over 20 years each of experience in building solutions, building teams, running companies, running projects, understanding customers," Meriçli said. "We are looking to take all of these lessons and use them for decision-making [efforts] going forward."
