Sub-system
A mobile base is a simpler machine than a robot arm and a harder product than it looks. It has to carry a payload across an industrial floor all shift, steer accurately enough for navigation to mean anything, stop inside the distance the safety case assumes, and hold position on a ramp with the power off.
In one sentence
Drive and power for mobile robots is the running gear of a mobile base: the wheel-drive units that move and steer it, the lithium battery and its management, and the charging arrangement that decides how much of a shift the robot spends working.
Vehicle builders rarely engineer the drive themselves. The component they buy is a bolt-in unit containing the motor, the gear reduction, the wheel, a holding brake and a feedback device in one housing, specified as a stopping distance and a holding torque rather than as a set of parts. That matters because the safety assessment for the whole vehicle is written against those numbers: a supplier change is a re-certification, which is why drive units are unusually sticky components in a market that otherwise moves quickly.
Energy decides the deployment economics. Lead-acid gave way to lithium iron phosphate for the same reasons it did in stationary storage — cycle life, and tolerance of partial charging without accelerated degradation. That tolerance is what makes opportunity charging viable: rather than removing a robot from service for an hour, the fleet tops it up for ninety seconds at a station it was passing anyway. The alternatives, battery swapping and simply buying more robots than the work requires, are both ways of paying for the same shortfall.
Stopping distance under a stated load, holding torque with power removed, and encoder resolution are the numbers a vehicle's safety case and its navigation both depend on. Because they are certified properties of the assembly rather than of any one part inside it, the vehicle maker is buying an assurance, and second-sourcing a drive unit means repeating the assessment rather than swapping a catalogue number.
Iron phosphate cells accept high charge rates at partial states of charge without the degradation that would make short top-ups uneconomic, which is precisely the property a fleet needs. The trade is energy density, and it matters less on a machine that works indoors and returns to a charger every hour than it would on a vehicle that has to go a long way. Contactless charging removes contact wear and the alignment problem, at some cost in efficiency.
On a small mobile robot, a certified two-dimensional safety laser scanner with configurable protective fields is frequently the most expensive single item on the bill of materials, and it is the component that sets how fast the vehicle may travel near people. It is a rated safety device rather than a sensor, which is why it is treated under safety and collaborative operation rather than as perception.
2 of these are marked as a chokepoint: a handful of qualified suppliers, a multi-year lead time, or a single geography.
The chemistry that made opportunity charging viable, from the same cell supply base as stationary storage and entry-level vehicles.
LFP cathodesCell balancing, state-of-charge estimation and charge control decide whether a pack survives thousands of partial charge cycles or degrades within a year of doing them.
Battery managementTraction motors in drive units use the same permanent magnets as vehicle powertrains and robot joints, from a supply base concentrated in one country.
Rare-earth magnetsThe rated device that stops the vehicle, with a certified failure rate and configurable protective fields; nothing in the navigation stack can substitute for it.
Safety and collaborationOdometry from the drive wheels is the estimate localisation corrects rather than replaces; a slipping or poorly resolved wheel encoder degrades navigation everywhere.
Position encodersThe controller that turns a velocity command into current in the traction motor, and that has to behave predictably when the safety device demands a stop.
Motion controlOther pages in this map that name Drive and power as something they cannot do without.
What each company supplies at this step, and — where a public figure exists — its share of this specific market — with what that share measures, the period it covers and who published it. Some rows also show the company’s own reported revenue for the segment covering this step, which is a different thing: it says how much this business matters to that company, not how much of the market it holds. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.
Supplies Dunkermotoren drive units and controllers used across guided vehicle and mobile robot builders.
Supplies traction motors and integrated drive units across the size range.
Supplies Kollmorgen drive and control hardware designed for guided vehicles.
Supplies lithium motive power batteries and the chargers for industrial trucks and mobile robots.
Supplies integrated wheel-drive units combining motor, gearbox, brake and feedback in one assembly.
Supplies traction and lift drive units for industrial trucks and heavy guided vehicles.
Supplies industrial battery chargers designed into mobile equipment rather than sold alongside it.
Supplies lithium packs and management electronics designed into mobile robots.
Whether contactless charging displaces contact charging as fleets shorten their top-up intervals.
Whether drive units consolidate onto fewer certified platforms as safety assessment costs rise.
Whether magnet supply constraints reach mobile robots, which compete for the same material as vehicle powertrains.
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.