DC Velocity - November 2013

BATTERY HANDLING
SOLUTIONS
SINCE 1946

MTCWORLDWIDE.COM

800.433.3110

today’s robots not only see better, they see faster—an attribute with major implications for DCs. “Today’s systems not only offer robot vision with fine detail, they offer much higher speeds than in the past,” he says. “That’s what we needed to be able to survive the robust nature of the DCs.

When a shipping wave
comes at you, it’s partially
controlled pandemonium.
That’s a difficult environ-
ment for a robot.”
But it’s not just about
enhancements in vision.

Advances in controls have played a role as well, Larry Boroff, director of automation systems engineering for systems integrator and supply chain consultancy Forte, notes that he has seen gains from manufacturers in both mechanical systems and underlying technology. “The gripper mechanisms are getting better, and vision systems are start-ing to get better,” he says.

BUILDING COMPLEX PALLETS

One result of these enhancements is to boost robots’ capabilities in an area where they have already made great inroads in DCs—palletizing and depalletizing. It’s a timely advance, as rainbow pallets (those with a variety of different items) are becoming more common, especially in retailing. Earlier generations of palletizers worked well with cartons of a uniform size. The new generation can accommodate cartons of a variety of sizes and weights.

“We’re trying to right-size all the cartons, so the number of box sizes is going up,” says Tymensky. “We want to optimize the palletizing, and in the past, we had to do that manually.” The newest generation of palletizing robots are able to manage that variety.

Not only can today’s robots handle cartons of different sizes, but they can also load them on pallets in a specific order.

Starovasnik says that robotic systems from
dling consultancy, believes the
future of robots in DCs is “unlimit-
ed.” He foresees a day when robots
in the DC interact more frequently
with other machines than with
humans. “We’re getting closer and
closer to the lights-out realm we’ve
envisioned for many years,” he says.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get to that completely, but robots are interfacing more with the machine and less with the person.”

ROBOTS “SEE” BETTER, FASTER
As for what’s led to the increased
presence of robots in DCs, the
experts interviewed for this article
agreed that it was more about tech-
nological breakthroughs and
enhancements than changes in the
robotic hardware itself. The robot
manufacturers have already solved
most of the problems around the
physical handling of products,
explains Dean Starovasnik, practice
leader for distribution engineering
design at Atlanta-based systems
integrator and consultancy Peach
State Integrated Technologies.

Tymensky of Fortna agrees.

“The real advances have been in the software and vision systems and learning techniques,” he says. Those vision system improvements—the cameras and related technology that enable robots to “see” what they are handling—allow robots to manipulate a greater variety of products than in the past, a key capability in a DC environment. Also important, he says, is the ability to retrain robots quickly as patterns in the DC change, which happens much more often than in manufacturing.