Sick AG is a company based in Waldkirch

Waldkirch

Waldkirch is a town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is known as "the place of mechanical organs", where fairground organs are manufactured and played on the streets from well-known manufacturers, such as A. Ruth and Sohn, Bruder and Carl Frei .-Sights:* The Catholic Church St...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. It produces sensors and sensor solutions for industrial applications. The company is active in the areas of factory and logistics automation

Logistics automation

Logistics automation is the application of computer software and/or automated machinery to improve the efficiency of logistics operations. Typically this refers to operations within a warehouse or distribution center, with broader tasks undertaken by supply chain management systems and enterprise...

 and process automation.

Five LIDARs

LIDAR

LIDAR is an optical remote sensing technology that can measure the distance to, or other properties of a target by illuminating the target with light, often using pulses from a laser...

 produced by the Sick AG were used for short range detection on Stanley

Stanley (vehicle)

Stanley is an autonomous vehicle created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory...

, the autonomous car

Driverless car

An autonomous car, also known as robotic or informally as driverless, is an autonomous vehicle capable of fulfilling the human transportation capabilities of a traditional car. As an autonomous vehicle, it is capable of sensing its environment and navigating on its own...

 that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge

DARPA Grand Challenge

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for driverless vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense...

 and can be seen on the roof of the vehicle. SICK/IBEO LIDARs were also used for obstacle avoidance, mapping and pedestrian tracking on WAMbot, the autonomous vehicle that came 4th in the MAGIC 2010 competition

Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge

The Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge is a 1.6 million dollar prize competition for autonomous mobile robots funded by TARDEC and the DSTO the primary research organizations for Tank and Defense research in the United States and Australia respectively...

History

Sick AG was founded in 1946 by Erwin Sick (1909-1988). He received a license from the temporary American government

Allied Occupation Zones in Germany

The Allied powers who defeated Nazi Germany in World War II divided the country west of the Oder-Neisse line into four occupation zones for administrative purposes during 1945–49. In the closing weeks of fighting in Europe, US forces had pushed beyond the previously agreed boundaries for the...

 to operate his engineering firm.

The first mass-produced product was a safety light-grid, shown at the International Machine Tool Trade Fair in Hannover 1952.