Modern factories and distribution centers operate at a pace and complexity that traditional planning tools were never designed for. These environments shift constantly: racks move, automation zones expand, and people and vehicles navigate layouts that often diverge from the latest drawings, even in organizations with strong documentation habits.
This isn’t a failure of technology adoption. It’s simply how fast-moving industrial facilities behave.
The result is a practical challenge: decisions about automation, robotics, fleet coordination, and future layouts are often made without a fully accurate view of current conditions. And when humans and autonomous systems share the same floor, outdated information can lead to rework, slower deployments, and glaring safety risks.
To address this, KION, NavVis, and NVIDIA are collaborating to enable a closed-loop workflow. It begins with capturing the facility as it exists today, continues through simulation and AI training in a realistic digital environment, and feeds insights back into operations.
Each company contributes something essential:
NavVis provides high-fidelity spatial data.
NVIDIA provides open libraries, models, and frameworks and accelerated AI infrastructure.
KION brings deep operational expertise and uses the strengths of both – NavVis and NVIDIA, to create a representation of the physical world for planning, simulation, optimization, and visualization.
Together, these technologies, capabilities, and expertise form a practical system for understanding, testing, and improving complex logistics operations.
NavVis is a global provider of mobile mapping systems and digital factory solutions. Its technology allows enterprises to document their facilities quickly and with the precision required for robotics, automation, and large-scale planning.
With NavVis VLX 3, teams can scan vast industrial environments with millimeter accuracy. The system produces dense point clouds, high-quality imagery, and globally aligned geometry that reflect the current state of the facility. This fidelity is essential for any simulation or AI model that depends on accurate spatial context. The data is then processed in NavVis IVION, which becomes a source of truth for the as-is data in the digital twin. NavVis IVION organizes point clouds, imagery, and annotations into an accessible browser-based environment where engineering, operations, and automation teams can review and collaborate. It provides the stable, verified baseline that anchors all downstream planning and simulation.
The NavVis IVION Point Streaming API allows global customers in manufacturing, process industry and warehousing and logistics to efficiently stream selected point cloud data from NavVis IVION into 3rd party software, including applications built on OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries. The NavVis IVION API takes advantage of NavVis IVION’s new capabilities such as Point Cloud Cleaning and Hide Overlap that ensure that the streamed data is the best and most recent data available. This is particularly important in environments that change and are rescanned frequently.
NVIDIA provides the open libraries, models, frameworks and accelerated AI infrastructure needed to build physically-based digital twins and simulations for designing, testing, and validating physical AI and robotics. NVIDIA Omniverse, is a collection of open libraries and frameworks for developing industrial digital twins, physical AI, and autonomous robotics.
NVIDIA Omniverse libraries include point cloud streaming APIs that, when combined with the NavVis IVION Point Streaming API, allow KION to stream data on-demand into their digital twin applications. With this workflow, KION teams gain access to large-scale, as-is data for deep dive work.
By integrating NVIDIA Isaac Sim, an open-source reference framework built on NVIDIA Omniverse™ for simulating and testing AI-driven robotics and the NVIDIA Mega Blueprint, KION is able to transform the NavVis-derived digital twin into a dynamic virtual warehouse. This environment supports three core workflows:
Facility and Warehouse Planning: Teams explore layout options, storage strategies, and flow patterns without disrupting live operations.
System Simulation and Validation: Automation logic, fleet management systems, and integrated operations can be tested in a realistic environment grounded in the actual facility.
Robot Training and Synthetic Data Generation: KION uses their solutions built on NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, Isaac Sim, and the Mega blueprint to generate large volumes of synthetic sensor data – lidar, RGB, depth, segmentation – to train AI models for KION’s autonomous forklifts and AMRs. These models encounter rare or complex scenarios digitally before encountering them in the real world.
The accuracy of NavVis data strengthens these workflows, while KION’s operational experience ensures simulations reflect true warehouse conditions.
KION is dedicated to helping customers implement automation solutions customized to their technological environments and specific requirements. Thus, KION is shaping world trade – globally, regionally, and locally.
KION brings industry expertise and practical solutions built on NVIDIA’s open libraries and frameworks for warehouse automation and robotics. As one of the world’s leading providers of industrial trucks, warehouse automation systems, and supply-chain technologies, KION brings deep practical insight into how goods, people, and machines move through a facility. Their experience spans material flow, human–machine interaction, and the complexities of operating mixed fleets at scale.
Copyright: Linde Material Handling
KION also uses NavVis technology today in a very direct and operational way. Their Solution Design teams rely on NavVis systems when working with end customers:
instead of manually measuring a warehouse and relying on outdated drawings, they scan it.
The resulting data from these scans is used to plan supply chain automation projects with greater accuracy, spend less time on site, and collaborate more effectively across teams. This brings immediate value, long before simulation or digital twins enter the picture, and ensures that KION can deliver higher-quality outcomes to the customers they serve.
Streaming the NavVis Point Cloud data directly into KION’s solutions eases the process of creating digital representations for System Simulation and Validation as well as for Robot Trainings and Synthetic Data Generation. With a reliable digital twin in hand, KION advances its work in Physical AI – AI models shaped by the physical rules of real warehouses.
These models help teams evaluate layout changes, coordinate AMRs and automated forklifts, and understand how fluctuations in demand or new workflows will affect operations. With solutions built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim and the NVIDIA Mega Blueprint, fleet behavior, automation logic, storage concepts, and flow patterns can be tested in a realistic and physically accurate environment which drastically reduces the implementation time as well.
Across the workflow, the roles of NavVis, KION, and NVIDIA remain visible and interdependent. NavVis provides accurate, up-to-date spatial data. NavVis IVION anchors it as the authoritative source of truth. KION uses the twin to analyze and refine operations
and uses its solutions built on NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to transform that understanding into simulation, planning, and AI training. The insights generated then flow back into the physical facility, completing the loop.
This model reflects a broader shift underway in industrial operations. As warehouses become more dynamic and automation becomes more central to daily workflow, real-world accuracy and digital simulation are merging into a single discipline. Digital twins are no longer static representations; they are becoming operational environments where ideas can be tested, risks minimized, and AI systems prepared for deployment.
What emerges is a more adaptable and resilient approach to intralogistics – one that allows organizations to explore change with confidence and build future systems on a foundation grounded in the truth of the physical world.