POWERING... AUTOMATED WAREHOUSES

Automated warehouses use many facets of automation, such as autonomous storage and retrieval systems, moving conveyor systems, palletizing and sorting systems, and automated guided vehicles and robots. Found throughout industries such as automotive, machine building, food and beverage, material handling, logistics, and e-commerce, warehouse automation is a fixture in today’s industrial environment. HELUKABEL offers a wide array of flexible and continuous-flex control, data, VFD/servo power and feedback cables, as well as the guidance and protection systems to ensure the transmission of power and data remains constant so materials stay on the move and arrive at the right place in your facility just in time.

Oftentimes, when providers install robotic pickers as a point solution and can’t pick certain items, humans must physically go to the robots to fix them, move the items, or restart the system. In this case, picking issues aren’t handled as part of the process flow and are considered failures.

Contrarily, with so much talk about collaborative robots and humans working efficiently with machines, Brightpick actualizes this concept by designing a robot’s inabilities into the workflow. Humans are included in fallback scenarios that keep operations running, so much so that there don’t appear to be any issues on the floor. And the machine-learning algorithms can collect information to make the robots smarter for next time.

The icing on the cake — and what e-grocers such as Rohlik love to hear — is that the solution takes mere weeks to deploy.

“There are three reasons we can deploy so quickly,” said Bakholdin. “First, we use standard commodity shelving and totes that can be procured anywhere, so they are very easy to assemble. Second, our robots use LiDAR for navigation, which is purely visual, so you don’t need any magnetic tape, QR codes, or fencing around the system. And the third part is probably the most important: All the heavy lifting — designing the solution, simulating it, and ensuring that it works — happens before the installation begins.”

The company uses a warehouse’s real-life historical data to create a detailed simulation and test the solution extensively to visualize the system’s behavior before installation. The team designs a digital twin of the facility and robot fleet and delivers an animation of the process and a detailed report with metrics. This simulation saves upfront time and costs to ensure the solution meets physical requirements and performance expectations.

“All the robots are standalone, selfsufficient, and equal,” said Zizka. “The entire idea is that there’s no single point of failure. If someone turned off or removed all the robots in the warehouse for some reason, the system would still work. Performance would be lower, but it would work exactly as before. We’d bring the robots, connect them to the Wi-Fi, and they’d run. It’s like plugging a USB stick into a laptop.”

Brightpick Autopickers were designed for e-commerce and grocery retailers and are suitable for large, small, and micro-fulfillment centers. They work with standard warehouse shelving and totes, enabling fast deployment and easy integration with any warehouse environment, including existing operations and mezzanines. l WH

Brightpick brightpick.ai

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Warehouse workers use headsets and wearables with voice-directed AI technology that synchronizes humans and machines.

By Rachael Pasini • Senior Editor