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.

2020 AGV Industry Trend Forecast: Vision Navigation Facing Upcoming Exposure?

2020 AGV Industry Trend Forecast: Vision Navigation Facing Upcoming Exposure?

Author: Huang Manting from xzlrobot.com

In terms of technological development and end user needs, vision navigation, as an emerging navigation method in AGV industry, is widely considered to be AGV industry mainstream in the future, and is expected to be a breaking dark horse in 2020. Taking the example of VisionNav Robotics, a representative enterprise in vision navigation AGV. It takes only 3 years to achieve turnover of more than 50 million Yuan in the sales of unmanned industrial vehicle, which attracts a lot of attention.

Table 1 Advantage and Disadvantage of Different Navigation Types

Navigation Type	Advantage	Disadvantage
Magnetic Navigation	Accurate positioning, relatively easy to place, change or extend routes, comparing to electromagnetic navigation, low cost	Vehicle can only run along with magnetic tape, cannot change tasks in real-time, magnetic tapes are easy to worn and need regular maintenance.
QR-code Navigation	Accurate positioning, small size with flexibility, relatively easy to place and change routes, communication easy to control, no interference to sound or light.	Routes need regular maintenance, and if it’s in complex sites, need to replace QR code label constantly.
Laser Navigation	Mature technology, enable to plan route flexibly, high positioning accuracy, flexible driving route, relatively easy for installation.	Manufacturing cost and price are relatively high, detective range is limited, mainly applied in indoor environment; missing semantic information in the map limits the ability to expand application in complex environment.
Vision Navigation	No limits for sensor detection distance, flexible route planning, high positioning accuracy, easy for installation, able to work both indoor and outdoor environment, low cost, able to extract semantic information in the map, high reusability in complex environment.	High dependency on the light, auxiliary sensors are needed in dark places or texture-free areas

Vision Navigation Basic Categories and Characteristics

Take sensor as the example, there are mainly 3 ways to realize the routes in Visual SLAM solutions: RGB-D depth-cameras such as Kinect/Kinect V2、Xtio; monocular (fisheye) cameras; binocular (or multiocular) cameras. In terms of realization difficulties, the general order is monocular vision > binocular vision > RGB-D.

Monocular SLAM is also called MonoSLAM，who can complete SLAM with only one camera. The benefits are that sensors are simple with low cost, therefore MonoSLAM has attracted much attention from researchers. Compared to other visual sensors, there is no need for monocular cameras to obtain environment absolute depth, so MonoSLAM is not affected by the size of the environment, and can be used in both indoor and outdoor.

In contrast to monocular, binocular (multiocular) cameras estimate spatial points locations through the baseline among multiple cameras, it can also estimate the depth of the environment  both in motion and motionless. Different from monocular, the configuration and calibration of binocular (multiocular) camera is relatively complicated, and its depth measurement range is limited by the baseline and resolution of the binocular, so FPGA is required to complete distance measurement.

RGB-D camera started to rise around 2010. Its biggest characteristics is that it can directly measure the distance between each pixel in the image and the camera through infrared structured light or Time-of-Flight principle. Therefore, it can provide more information than traditional cameras, and it can spend less time and efforts than monocular or binocular to calculate the depth. However, most RGB-D cameras still have problems such as narrow measurement range, large noise, and narrow views. Due to limit measurement range, it is mainly used for indoor SLAM.

Development Process of AGV Companies Applying Visual Navigation Technology

With continuous development of Industry 4.0, industrial automation and intelligent upgrades have more requirements to AGV for higher accuracy. At present, positioning accuracy of vision system used in automated production lines can reach 0.1mm. But for pure visual navigation AGV without fixed reference, its positioning accuracy is about 10mm, yet to be improved. In order to obtain higher accuracy, in addition to visual technology, AGV vision navigation systems also need to be combined with the assistance of other sensors.

How to improve positioning accuracy is always a problem that all AGV companies have been exploring. At 2019 CeMAT Asia, VisionNav Robotics unveiled their vision navigation control module stunningly. This universal module, which took 2 years to build, enables unmanned industrial vehicles to achieve positioning and operation accuracy of ± 3mm. and has been given its world’s first show in a precise multi-layer stacking solution based on vision technology. "In our industry, all valuable technologies and products need to be precipitated and excavated the requirement and application scenarios from a large number of customers, and in turn to force developer, and verify development results in customer’s actual requirement and application scenarios, and then forced developer again, to realize continuous iteration. If you only make a laboratory prototype or have just deployed 1-2 customer sites, you still have a long way to go for mass production, because you may not even understand customer’s actual requirements " said Dr. Luyang Li, CEO of VisionNav Robotics.

The responsibility of leading enterprises in the industry is to promote the appearance of industry explosion breaking point. Whether there is explosion breaking point for vision navigation in the fields of unmanned industrial vehicle, Dr. Li Luyang believes, 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.“

Core Advantage of Vision Navigation at Current Stage

After several iterations of vision navigating AGV, there is a great improvement for its stability and reliability. Mature vision navigation has the following three core advantages:

1）Strong Usability: Compared to other navigation types, vision navigation can extract semantic information from the environment, therefore it 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. Take VisionNav Robotics, who have several pioneering solutions for complex scenarios in the industry, as an example. Vision navigation not only enables AGV to firstly realize unmanned high level shelf operation at 9.4m, but also creatively solves unmanned transportation problem for multiple irregular parts combining industry-leading self-adaptive picking and placing goods technology and real-time positioning error correction technology,

2）Wide applicability: Adding modularized vision navigation technology to industrial vehicles can easily achieve unmanned transformation and upgrade. At present, vision navigation module from vision navigation AGV companies, such as VisionNav Robotics, can adapt to over 180 industrial vehicles models from 6 major 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.

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. Recently we have reached a 5G strategic cooperation fram agreement with ZTE, in order to promte the combination betwwen 5G technology and vision navigation industrial unmanned vehicles, and push forward the landing of innovation application scenarios and solution research. We have confidence to combine vision and the motion of industrial vehicle in a more perfect way in 2020, further improvet the product usability, applicability and cost performance, and promoting the appearance of industry break point.