VisionNav Robotics received CE certificate under the latest standard ISO3691-4:2020 from TÜV SÜD.

NEWS FLASH | #VisionNavRobotics received #CEcertificate under the latest standard #ISO3691-4:2020 from TÜV SÜD. ISO 3591-4:2020, continually evolving new technologies and industrial driverless trucks, raises higher level of #safetyrequirements to #AutomatedGuidedForklifts

VisionNav Robotics Announces 100 Million Yuan in Series B1 Investment

VisionNav Robotics, the leader of vision guided industrial vehicles for material handling in China, announced that it has raised 100 million RMB in Series B1 funding. The round was led by Lenovo Capital, with participation from Flyfot Ventures and the existing investors Eastern Bell Capital.

The new capital will be used on R&D of visual control and perception technology, accelerating new product introduction to on-demanding industrial settings previously scheduled for 2021 and 2020, as well as support the company’s business growth and market expansion.

Founded in 2016, VisionNav Robotics is one of the forefront players in vision guided vehicles worldwide. VisionNav’s technology, which combines visual controls, perceptions and 5G technology into their vehicles, transforms standard industrial trucks into a new generation of automated facilities in manufacturing, warehousing and logistics industries known as vision guided vehicles (VGVs). They resemble standard forklift trucks but working completely automatically because they come equipped with cameras, AI and sophisticated algorithms to navigate in dynamic environments and transport goods to and from loading docks, warehouses, production lines and other industrial settings.

“When considering warehousing automation, customers always seek for quick deployment, high operation efficiency and short payback period,” said Li Luyang, CEO and cofounder of VisionNav Robotics. Vision guided vehicle is a versatile and cost-effective solution for different logistics nodes, such as logistic parks, logistics warehouses, manufacturing warehouses, workshops, factories, intralogistics within the airports and habors. “The same vehicle can do many different jobs such as loading and unloading, picking and put-away, storage and relocation, reducing initial investment and saving operating and maintenance cost.”

VisionNav’s solution is not only about the vehicles, although there are already 5 series of autonomous vehicles including pallet movers, pallet stackers, reach trucks, towing trucks and combustion trucks. It also includes robot control system for the integration with multiple-level system, and goods position detection system for multi-object identification. The solution helps customers from different industries to manage their process in multiple dimensions. Many of VisionNav’s customers are from factory logistics (automobile manufacturing, 3C, food and pharmaceutical, etc.) and warehousing logistics (e-commerce, retail, 3PL, aviation, etc.), such as Amway, Walmart, DHL, Cainiao, Gree, etc.

When it comes to company’s future growth, Li Luyang express his ambition to play on the international stage. “We will take Southeast-Asia as our first target market, then gradually expand our footprints to Europe and America. It’s just a massive worldwide market with significant growth.”

http://en.visionnav.cn/show-32-152.html

Review | DHL Supply Chain Team Visited VisionNav Robotics for further cooperation

DHL is one of the best contract logistics suppliers in the world, who has always been a strong supporter of innovation and change in logistics industry. On October 30, DHL Supply Chain sent a team to visit VisionNav Robotics at the headquarters in Shenzhen. During the visit, Dr. Fang Mu, the CTO of Visoinnav Robotics, introduced their unmanned products and business mode to DHL team. Deepening cooperation between two parties can be expected soon.

Figure: DHL Supply Chain team visited VisionNav Robotics

"VisionNav Robotics have profound technology research & development and long-term project experience in the field of vision-guided unmanned forklift." Representative from delegation team affirmed the professionalism of VisionNav Robotics visual AI technology, and asked about efficiency and safety of unmanned forklift technology when replacing labor. “It involves a large number of goods detection and information reading processes. Although the efficiency of unmanned forklift cannot reach the level of manual handling, by 24/7 longtime working with high efficiency, it can meet the total needs of inbound and outbound in warehousing companies" Dr. Fang Mu also introduced the unique safety protection module in their forklifts, which can effectively avoid obstacles. Up to now, all launched forklifts in operations are in good conditions and they can effectively adapt to a variety of complex scenarios, providing a large number of data precipitation and scenario reference for the diverse needs of subsequent users.

Figure: Dr. Fang Mu, the Vice General Manager of VisionNav Robotics

Figure: DHL Supply Chain Delegation Team

Later, the delegation team visited the unmanned warehouse of VisionNav Robotics for the handling demonstration. Dr Fang highlighted their vision navigation module, a visual camera on top of the vehicle. Unmanned forklift perceives environment through visual information. It saves various environmental information as offline map, and compares the information between real-time image and offline map during operation to locate and navigate. A seemingly simple unmanned forklift in fact integrates the most cutting edge technologies including AI vision, servo control and cloud storage, making it the most promising industrial robot in the market.

Figure: DHL Supply Chain Delegation Team at VisionNav Robotics Unmanned Warehouse

Video: DHL Supply Chain Delegation Team Visited VisionNav Robotics

DHL has been a long-term partner of VisionNav Robotics. In the previous cooperation, VisionNav Robotics has provided intelligent warehousing proposal for DHL bonded warehouse. It takes about 2 months to import the project. It can seamlessly integrate to the existing WMS system and realize multi-machine collaborative unmanned operation, avoiding the danger of high level shelf operation and improving the warehousing efficiency by more than 20%. The visit of further enhanced mutual trust between DHL and VisionNav Robotics, and increase the possibility of international business cooperation.

 

Review | VisionNav Robotics First Show With Its New Technology in CeMAT 2019

2019 CeMAT Asia attracted over 120,000 professional audiences and visitors from Germany, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdoms, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Israel and other countries and regions. Under the series theme of “Smart Drive, Smart Logistics”, the show presented advanced innovation technological achievements and solutions in domestic and international logistics fields. As a pioneer domestic company in the field of vision navigation industrial driverless vehicle, VisionNav Robotics unveiled its unmanned solution to stack four layer cages, making the booth highly popular and crowded.

Glimpse of New Trends in Smart Logistics at CeMAT

With the rapid development of economy and e-commerce, the word "Smart Logistics" has frequently become the hot search in the major media in recent years. With the explosion of orders, consumers require a higher level of logistics efficiency and service quality. Thus warehouse logistics companies started to explore more advanced and applicable devices and methods to increase logistics operation efficiency and safety.

In CeMAT, major brands have emerged. Both industrial robot giants and smart logistics new-comers have launched their new products based on AI technology. From this exhibition, we can see logistics industry empowered by AI technology has shown great potential. Application of AI visual technology in information storage, transportation and picking & sorting fields, which represents the future development trend, is also becoming mature. There are huge breakthroughs and major leaps in product maturity in particularly.

Figure: Automated stacking technology based on vision navigation

Unmanned Stacking Solution from VisionNav Robotics Attracts Great Attentions

As early as August 2019, the unmanned multi-layer cages stacking solution from VisionNav Robotics has made its debut in the automotive manufacturing area. It has attracted plenty attentions and favors of many intelligent manufacturing and storage companies. The public appearance of this solution represents another breakthrough and upgrade of VisionNav Robotics unmanned forklifts in precise stacking application.

During the show, VisionNav Robotics in particular presented the demonstration of cages picking at random locations and stacking to high-level. Even customer move the position and angle of the cage randomly, the unmanned forklift can still adjust itself to pick and stack the cages accurately. “In the complex stacking scenarios, it requires more flexibility when connecting automated equipment and manual operations. For unmanned forklift, such flexibility is the self-adaption and self-corrective ability to pallets and cages hat is randomly displaced by human.” Officials from VisionNav Robotics introduced that the self-adaptive cage stacking operation integrates spatial perception, pallet detection and servo control techniques, which can help more intelligent manufacturing companies, especially auto parts manufacturer a more safer, reliable and cost-effective storage experience.

Video: 60 second review of VisionNav Robotics

Driven by Capital and Tech, Smart Forklift Segmentation Develops Rapidly

From overall industrial structure, when smart logistics continues to do well in 2019, some segments have also entered a new ear, and industry segmentation has begun to take shape. Compared to 2018, number of exhibitors who present unmanned forklifts in this exhibition has accounted for half. As the most needed vehicles in the industry, we can see forklifts still play a pivotal role in the logistics industry.

The emergence at largely of unmanned forklifts this year is mainly motivated by both capital and technology. With the breakthrough and application of vision technology, unmanned forklift manufacturers with independent development capabilities are increasingly favored by the capitals. During the exhibition, multiple investment institutions visited VisionNav Robotics, consulted in detail about their products and solutions, and gave favorable comments on the deployment of the product and market at strategic levels get

The multi-layer cage stacking solution showed in this exhibition is an active attempt for VisionNav Robotics to enter unmanned forklift competition in high-end market. In the next few years, VisionNav Robotics will launch more and more unmanned industrial vehicles such as unmanned cranes, airport tractors, etc. In compliance with the wish of "liberating global industrial vehicles", VisionNav Robotics will continue to further explore. Future and  VisionNav Robotics can both be expected!

VisionNav Robotics, Leader of Vision Navigation Unmanned Industrial Vehicles

VisionNav Robotics, Leader of Vision Navigation Unmanned Industrial Vehicles

Author: Huang Manting from xzlrobot.com

Founded in 2016 by a team of professor and D.Eng. from the Chinese university of Hong Kong, VisionNav Robotics becomes the dark horse in mobile robot (AGV) industry in China With world-leading vision navigation technology and strong explosiveness, it takes only 3 years to reach turnover of over 50 million RMB, which attracts tremendous attentions.

Focusing on vision navigation with different technologies

Compared to other AGV navigation such as magnetic, QR code and laser, there are three core advantages for vision navigation.

1）Strong Usability: Visual camera can obtain rich information such as color, texture, etc. These can help mobile robots to achieve effective positioning, controlling and perception in natural environment. It can greatly improve operation efficiency, accuracy and stability, as well as reduce project installation difficulties and shorten onsite installation time. Compared to other navigation methods, vision navigation from VisionNav Robotics can adapt to complex scenarios in the demand of customer’s regular use. For example, deformed racks or pallets after long-time use, large proportion of oversize goods, unpredictable transportation needs with periodical surge, vehicle dispatching and scheduling in narrow space, etc.

2）Wide applicability: Adding modularized vision navigation technology to industrial vehicles can easily realize unmanned transformation and upgrade. At present, VisionNav Robotics can work with over 180 industrial vehicles from 6 brands.

3）Cost-effective：

Cost advantage of vision sensors has significantly reduced the price of the product. The price of industrial camera from world’s top-level supplier is around 3000 RMB, which is 10%-20% of the price of same level laser sensors. Therefore, in terms of ROI or payback period for end customer, there is an obvious advantage for vision navigation unmanned industrial vehicles.

It takes 9 year (6 years before company establishment and 3 years after) for VisionNav Robotics team to make “unmanned industrial vehicles driven by vision navigation technology” in the worldwide. The vision navigation unmanned industrial vehicle modules and vehicle scheduling system self-developed by the team lead the standards of underlying positioning, perception and control logic in international robotics technologies. There is extremely strong product competitiveness in both domestic and global market.

Dr. Li Luyang, co-founder of VisionNav Robotic told reporter from xzlrobot.com in an interview earlier, that “VisionNav Robotics is still working on vision navigation technology at the current stage. By improving the information acquisition ability and information transmission speed, vision and motion of industrial vehicles can be combined in a more perfect way, which can further improve the easy-to-use, applicability and cost-effectiveness, and promote the inflection point of industry.

https://v.qq.com/x/page/e3015x52h3y.html

Video: Mr. Li Luyang from VisionNav Robotics interviewed by reporter from xzlrobot.com

Lead globally in vision unmanned industrial vehicles area with large amount of applications in head customers

VisionNav Robotics is a company providing a platform to do unmanned transform and upgrade to industrial vehicles. Their business includes unmanned industrial vehicles development and transformation in production lines, warehouses, logistics parks, airports and other semi-structured scenarios. It is reported that vision navigation unmanned industrial vehicles from VisionNav Robotics have been applied successfully in over 30 sites from industrial head customers.

There are 2 advantages of VisionNav Robotics, which will keep the leading in vision navigation unmanned industrial vehicle area.

（1）   Technical accumulation. For 9 years VisionNav Robotics has been working on vision navigation field in depth. With the help of their world-class team they will continue to increase spending in vision navigation R&D in the next 3 years to build higher technical barrier. “The responsibility of leading enterprises in the industry is to promote the appearance of industry explosion breaking point. VisionNav Robotics is make its own efforts. Whether there is explosion breaking point for vision navigation in the fields of unmanned industrial vehicle, the decisive factor is not market demands, but technology and product. It is fair enough to say that there are no any unmanned industrial vehicles of any companies worldwide can fully meet the customer's requirement on efficiency, function, cost, and vehicle reformation.Therefore we will not feel any comfort for the current situation, instead we should increase the investment on R&D, strive forward with our whole heart and mind and never stop working deeply on vision navigation and products until our technology and project can fully meet customer’s requirement.” Dr. Li Luyang emphasized in the interview.

（2）   The landing of mature business mode helps to accumulate rich project experience. Vision navigation unmanned industrial vehicles and systems from VisionNav Robotics is known to apply successfully in many fields including ecommerce logistics, retail logistics, bonded logistics, FMCG, automotive manufacturing, new energy, and so on. More than 60% of their customers are the world’s top 500 companies. VisionNav Robotics can provide solutions for complex scenarios, many of them are industry first and advanced, such as 9.4m high level unmanned loading on racks, self-adaption picking and placing goods technology, real-time positioning with correction technology. These can creatively solve the difficulties to automatically transport irregular parts. During 2019 CeMat Asia, VisionNav Robotics exhibited their vision navigation control module, and the world’s first highly precise stacking solution of multiple cages. “In our industry, all valuable technologies and products need to be precipitated and excavated by a large amount of customer requirements and application scenarios, then force engineers to verify their R&D result in customer actual requirement and applications, then again force back the engineer for continuous iteration. If you only make a laboratory prototype or only deploy at 1-2 customer sites, there is still a long distance for volume production, because you may even understand the actual requirement of your customer. The advantage of VisionNav Robotics lies in technology and product continuous iteration via large numbers of customer sites and applications. Their R&D team nevel alienate themselves from their customer to optimize products at the gradient directions, so that they can do at fastest speed of growth with highest efficiency.” Explained by Dr. Li Luyang about his thought of the relationship between customer needs and R&D.

Video: Onsite Application of Vision Navigation UnmannedIndustrial Vehicles from VisionNav Robotics

As for the development in the future, Dr. Li Luyang said “the easiness, adaptability and cost-effectiveness of vision navigation technology needs continuous optimization. We will always adhere to it. Base on this, we’ve developed big outdoor scenarios using unmanned tractors in the airport. It will gradually extend to other important application scenarios such as wharfs. The goal of VisionNav Robotics is to become world leading company providing universal platform of precise driverless technology.”

With vision technology, VisionNav Robotics is solving something in real demands with its forklift AGVs

In the new era of unmanned logistics, warehousing becomes initial strategic point

Unmanned technology has become a heated topic in logistics industry since the beginning of the year 2020. The epidemic outbreak hits existing industries real hard, but also brings some opportunities –the restarting driverless vehicles are setting off another wave of robots replacing human. With expedited release of market demands and the support of technology and capital, unmanned logistics will enter a new era.

Looking from its overall structure, a logistics system can be viewed as a crisscrossed network, the connected nodes are logistics centers, enterprise warehouses and regional distribution points, and the interlaced lines are transportation services such as trunk transportation, branch transportation, and last-mile delivery. While road transportation using self-driving cars is still in the attempt, the technology of automatic warehousing seems to be more mature and is gradually becoming a strategic move in unmanned logistics.

Unmanned Logistics Full View

Forklift AGV has great potential with increasing needs of unmanned transportation inside the warehouse

Driven by market demands, technology development and other multiple factors, the unmanned process to replace traditional warehouse system has been accelerated. Automatic equipment inside a warehouse mainly include automatic sorting robots, wearable devices, cargo identification devices and forklift AGVs. While automatic sorting technology is still developing, cargo identification techniques are work-in-process, the most mature forklift AGVs with high cost-effective are much more popular.

According to the data released by CITA, the total sales volume of industrial vehicles in China are more than 600,000 units in 2019, indicating 2% increase compared to the previous year. Thereinto, about 298,600 units are forklifts in indoor warehouses, which makes up 43% of the total number. In addition, there is a growing trend for forklift in recent years. With the gradual deepening of “robots replacing human”, demands for forklift AGVs will be more and more obvious indicating a huge market potential.

2019 Industrial Vehicles Total Sales Volume in China

Complicated Intensive Storage Scenarios Are What Forklift AGVs Needs to Overcome

When it comes to operations inside the warehouse, there are mainly 2 scenarios for forklift AGVs to replace manual forklifts: 1. truck loading, different trucks such as cube, wing opening, flatbed, etc., in the environment of loading platform, factory/ in-house or container yard; 2. Intensive storage scenarios, including drive-in racks, beam type racks, narrow aisle racks, double deep racks, shuttle racks, stack racks and other pallet racking. With the deepening of automation integration and unmanned conditions getting mature, indoor intensive storage become the main scenarios to use Forklift AGVs.

6 Types of Racking in Intensive Storage

 “Space utilization of intensive storage for middle or high level racking is relatively high, making it one of the major storage types at present. Besides, complicated working condition of intensive storage scenarios raises higher requirement for forklift AGV at the same time.” said Dr. Li Luyang, CEO of VisionNav Robotics, one of the representative enterprises for visual driverless industrial vehicles in China. These requirements mainly are:

1) Higher accuracy: considering task completion and safety in the warehouse operations, there are higher requirements for forklift AGV in terms of positioning accuracy and operation accuracy.

2) High flexibility: forklift AGVs need to improve the flexibility and self-adaptability in order to cope with non-standardized manual operations, changes of different carriers, changes of operating space, etc.

3) High efficiency: as the entire logistics industry is speeding up, the advantage of forklift AGVs replacing manual forklifts is mainly lies in its efficiency.

4) Safety protection: the overall protection is not only to identify and avoid obstacles during the driving, but also to consider risks in high position and high-level racks operations, for example for safer technology is required for drive-in racks, narrow aisle racks, moveable stack racks, etc., to protect human, vehicles and goods.

With vision techniques, forklift AGVs can be widely applied in intensive storage scenarios

       To solve current problems faced by forklift AGVs in the intensive storage scenarios, we must highly rely on in-depth researches and innovations. When talking about industry development, Mr. Chen Baoqiang, deputy director of the National Engineering Quality Supervision and Inspection Center, emphasized the importance of in-depth technology innovations. “Lack of innovation means lack of driving force for industry progress. There will be no innovation without in-depth research.”

       Dr. Li Luyang also said during an interview with the reporter from XZL Robot Full-media, that the urgent tasks for forklift AGVs is to improve their level of intelligence. “You can simply view it as the robot ability to deal with non-standardized situations onsite, which is definitely based on the understanding and learning of the environment. Therefore vision technology is now the only way to improve forklift AGV intelligence, which is also what VisionNav Robotics has been working on for the past 3 years since the establishment.”

Vision Navigation Forklift AGVs for High Position from VisionNav Robotics

Visual sensors is also one of the heated topics in the fields of unmanned forklift researches. Compared to traditional laser sensors, visual sensors have stronger abilities of information acquisition, and better systematic expandability: (1) there are 5 million points of information in a 5-megapixel photo, and if 10 photos are acquired and processed in a second, it is equivalent to acquiring 50 million points of information; (2) the points in the photo contain more information than laser such as colors and patterns, providing a large amount of valuable information for positioning, control and environmental perception; (3) the perfect combination of vision and 5G in the future enable us to transmit image information to the cloud through high speed network for edge computing, or transmit to the serve for parallel computing, further improving the performance of vision navigation by a large margin.”

It is learned that VisionNav Robotics has been working deeply in the fields of vision navigation technology. With its unique techniques, rapid growth and strong explosive ability, VisionNav Robotics is the first company to complete reach truck unmanned modification and application for high level operation. They also overcome the challenges of stacking racks up to 4 levels precisely, which is one of the most difficult operations in the fields. Such stacking techniques have already been practically applied in an automatic warehouse of an auto parts manufacturer giant in South China. For the past 3 years, vision navigation forklift AGVs developed by VisionNav Robotics have been accumulated applied in over 150 complicated scenarios, including automatically picking and placing cargos from/to middle and high levels in domestic intensive warehouses of many leading enterprises in logistics, bonded, FMCG and other industries.

Application 1: Vision Navigation Forklift AGVs from VisionNav Robotics and its Application of Stacking Racks

Difficulties: stacking 30 different types of stack racks with wheels in random positions is a great challenge for forklift AGVs in terms of intelligence level and operational accuracy.

Application 2: Vision Navigation Forklift AGVs from VisionNav Robotics and its Application in High Level Beam Type Racks

Difficulties: compared to horizontal transportation, picking and placing cargo from/to high positions requires further detection of the storage locations, and such detection takes more time, therefore forklift AGVs should make a perfect balance among efficiency, accuracy, intelligence level and safety.

Application 3: Vision Navigation Forklift AGVs from VisionNav Robotics and its Application in Drive-in Racks

Difficulties: there is limited space in the drive-in racks, therefore the positioning accuracy and operational accuracy requirement for forklift AGVs is the highest among all types of racks; in addition, moving pallets like playing Klotski while keeping up with transportation tempo at the same time is also a big challenge for forklift AGV operation efficiency.

It is reported that VisionNav Robotics will further focus on the common requirements and pain points of forklift AGVs, developing applications for outdoor truck loading, improving application range and depth of driverless industrial vehicles, and providing highly effective solutions to more and more enterprises.

Product Testing of forklift AGV VNMR15

Sharing our latest video of our latest forklift AGV VNMR15 with:

1) Vision navigation

2) Cargo identification

3) 3m lifting height

4) ultra+ laser scanner

5) automatic label scanning

6) automatic charging

Your best choice for low-level rack shelves in the warehouse!

ForkliftAGV

ForkliftAGV

ForkliftAGV

High-Flex Automated Warehouse Solution Applied in Auto Parts Industry

Abstract: Affected by the change of international automotive consumption structure, OBM dynamically adjust their capital investment in R&D, manufacturing, management and many other aspects. Flexibly automatic warehousing solution has become the first choice of many B-end customers because it can increase storage capacity and reduce unit storage cost.

Warehouse of Auto Parts

Rigid Transportation Demand for Auto Parts Manufacturer

A few days ago, VisionNav Robotics completed the implementation of an unmanned warehousing solution for a auto parts manufacturer giant in South China. The company is a Sino-Japanese joint venture with an area of nearly 130,000 square meters. There are more than 1,500 employees and the total number of storage locations per floor is more than 5,000. Its main business includes manufacturing of stamping and welding parts for car body, the design and manufacture of stamping die for the covers of car body, tire of the car, car fixtures, design and manufacturing of inspection device, etc., which indicates huge demands of material handling.

Automotive Auto Part Production Line

Unmanned Stacking Solution for Stamping Die for the Covers of Car Body

There are multifarious types of auto parts in the factory. Welding workshop of car body covers and finished goods stockpiling area are located in a square area on the first floor. After finishing stamping, welding, quality inspection and other production processes in the central area, each 10-12 parts will be put into the same frame and manually transported to the nearby temporary stockpiling area. All the trucks are waiting at corresponding platform for loading and then send to downstream final-assembly workshop for car assembly process. Because the size of auto parts are so different, there are 50 different types of material frame in use for storage in the factory.

Irregular Auto Parts

There is an independent storage unit every 100 square meters in stockpiling area, equipped with 2 pallet forklifts and one counterbalance forklift for frame stacking and loading to the truck in the unit. People who working From production to storage, people who are working in the entire process involves welding workers, stamping workers, quality inspectors, material handlers between production lines and storage area, forklift drivers, and on-site dispatch workers. In order to adapt to production cycle time, the factory is running three shifts operation.

 Auto Parts Stockpiling Area

Business Pain Point

From the lean production prospect, there are significant wastes during the production activities, which can be summarized as below:

1. Redundant transportation —— unnecessary goods movements;
2. Waiting —— it’s easy to have “traffic jam” during the peak of delivery bringing waiting; Late delivery or service in upstream production activities causes work delay in downstream final assembly workshop, which thereby will have impact material deployment plan for the next cycle.
3. Excess operation —— unnecessary operation during the work; Operators need to confirm twice before loading to the truck, such extra process reduces working efficiency.
4. Manual forklift varies in operation efficiency, it takes less than 2 minutes to stack the first 2-3 level of the cages, but working efficiency drops at a rate of 50% for 4-6 level due to the changes of the height and angle.

The above four factors are positively related to the number of on-site personnel, therefore optimizing transportation process, reducing personnel and keep the balance of transportation during the operation become the focus of our consideration

Workers Manually Transport the Goods

Unmanned Warehouse Solution

We provide solutions considering four aspects, which is functional positioning, process optimization, personnel streamlining and equipment upgrading:

All stockpiling areas will be divided into function units of 100 square meters. 7 units which are closer to the outbound platform is used for quick deliver and only keeping ready-to-go cages for the day. Other finished goods will be stored uniformly into the stockpiling units that away from the platform.

Set up fixed route for material transfer from production line to stockpiling area, and use 8 pallet forklift AGV to complete the transportation, not including truck loading. Travel distance for each vehicle is no more than 100 meters.

• Use 1 VisionNav Robotics counterbalanced forklift AGV to stack cages automatically in each stockpiling unit. Not using manual forklift anymore, and it will only takes 1 operator to work 3 shifts in each stockpiling unit.
• For the problem of different cage specification, adding self-adaptive fork arm function in the automated forklift enable to accurately fork and pile cages according to different distance and height in three dimensions.

Operation of the Unmanned Forklift

Overall Benefits

• Carrier: the number of manual forklift and forklift driver reduce by N-1 when using unmanned forklift;
• Flow Direction: clearer flow direction from production line to stockpiling units has been specified to reduce waiting time and traffic jam of the forklifts
• Capacity: unmanned forklift works continuously and completes stacking of 600-700 material cages stably every day;
• Flow Travel: save 1km driving mileage for each forklift
• Flow Efficiency: stabilize the supply to downstream components, reduce the fluctuation range of the production and distribution plan, and improve overall production efficiency by 70%

Automated Stacking Operation Area

Automated Stacking Solution for Car Tyres

Considering the great benefit of cage stacking in the first phase, currently customer plans to launch the second phase project, car tyres unmanned transportation. The transportation process for the tyres is relatively simple. The warehouse is mainly for storage; and all the tires are packed into material cages of same size and specification. There are 10 tyres in each cage and the height of a cage is about 1.5m. The idea is to have 6 cages stacking on top of each other in each location to maximum the utilization of storage space.

The biggest problem is when stacking to 4-6 layers, the operation efficiency of manual forklift drops dramatically, while coefficient of unsafety increases. The solution from VisionNav Robotics is to use their reach forklift AGV, which is capable for 9m stacking. It takes on average 15 minutes for each process, and such stability becomes the biggest advantage when no rush delivery is required.

A Demonstration of Stacking 3 Layer Cages for Car Tyre

Technology of Irregular Part Unmanned Transportation Scenario Is Mature Now

For manufacturing industry, stacking material cages / frames is rigid demand. Compared to the racks, cages can make better use of the space in a warehouse. For low level stacking (2-3 layers), manual forklift have more advantage than unmanned forklift; for high level stacking (4-6 layers), however, unmanned forklift have more advantage in turn. The advantage of VisionNav Robotics unmanned forklift lies in its fork arm self-adaptive adjustment, and real time positioning deviation correction, which can bring stable efficiency to load and unload goods every time, and lower operational danger. It’s a great benefit for plants and warehouses with large areas and large scale of massive production.

VisionNav Robotics have rich experience on handling complicated scenarios, we’ve identified and stack cages and frames with over 150 specifications accurately and automatically so far. Recently, VisionNav Robotics is preparing a new test for irregular part unmanned transportation project. Apart from the iteration of fork arm self-adaptive function 2.0 version, the algorithm about robot control and perception level has also been optimize and upgraded. And for further information, please stay tune and find more details in the upcoming application updates.