Statistics from China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows that 5.23 million commercial vehicles were produced in China in 2020, with an 20% increase. And the sales volume also increase by 18% to 5.1 million units. As car industry performs better than expected, tire manufacturing, the upstream industry is also on the rise.
According to data released by the National
Bureau of Statistics, China's cumulative output of rubber tires reaches 81.47
million units last year with an increase of 1.7%. From August to December,
monthly output increased by over 10%. The tire industry is growing rapidly in
post-epidemic era.
Recently, VisonNav Robotics has worked with
the world’s top10 tire manufacturing company,
to provide solution for their warehouse
transformation and automation upgrades.
【Project
Overview】
There are two warehouses of 40,000m2
in customer factory. Both warehouses are built with multiple floors. The idea
is to use driverless forklift AGVs to transport tires with racks to the
warehouse and store by stacking up to 6 layers. Each rack only stores tire of
same batch and same SKU. The total 1600 SKUs will be transported to outbound
staging area when there are ship out requests. Forklift AGVs also transport
empty racks for recycling in the warehouse.
【Project
Difficulties】
1. Cross-floor material handling. Storage
area on each floor is 438*95m. Such large space takes a lot of time and efforts
to rearrange storage locations in the early stage. And it’s more challenging to
meet customer’s expectation regarding multi-floor interconnection and forklift
agv auto docking with elevator.
2. System integration with high flexibility.
To better dock with customer's existing WMS system, VisionNav's software system
shall schedule forklift AGVs to execute inbound and outbound tasks for a large
number of SKUs. It's even more challenging to dock with mechanical arms in
production line and the operators/terminals in loading dock area.
3. High precision. The total weight of one
rack is around 856kg with limited space for fork entry. The spread distance
between fork entry holes is also different from rack to rack. What's more, the
opening size of the four feet is small. Therefore, the accuracy of the
operation is extremely high when need to self-adaptively fork the rack and
stack to 6 layers.
4. High efficiency. There are more than
110,000 tires being stored in and 120,000 to 200,000 tires shipped out in daily
basis. Therefore, transportation frequency is high and also high efficiency is
required.
【Solution】
Considering the project scale, efficiency
and customer expectations, VisioNnav plan to offers 69 driverless forklifts of
various types, as well as softwares including Warehouse Management System and
Robot Control System and other backup systems, to help upgrade the warehouse
both in material handling and data record.
In order to improve the operation
efficiency, VisionNav forklift AGVs are programmed to execute these below
processes: warehouse (transport racks to inbound area) → transfer to buffer
area (unload the racks to be stored, and transport racks to outbound area) → outbound
area (unload the racks to outbound, transport back the empty racks) → transfer
to buffer area / inbound area (unload the empty racks).
VisionNav
Robotics Warehouse Management System
Storage location management function:
Record the real-time status of the storage position and number the goods of the
current storage location.
Storage location sorting function: Tallying
goods in spare time according to pre-set.
Report function: Generate reports about inbound,
outbound and real-time inventory.
Cargo information management function:
Manage cargo information.
Location allocation function: Support
customized the storage location allocation strategy when inbound.
Material picking function: Automatically
select the outbound cargo based on the recorded goods information.
VisionNav
Robot Control System
VisionNav Robot Control System is developed
for the scenarios of discrete tasks, indefinite intervals, and long-term
delivery in material handling. It can realize multi-vehicle task scheduling and
path planning to improves overall logistics efficiency without sacrificing
vehicles’ running speed while no collision and congestion.
【Function
Description】
Automatic inbound: VisionNav Robotics
Warehouse Control System can dock with MES system (robotic arms put tires into
the rack, upon completion it will send signal to VisionNav Robotics Warehouse
Control System with tire material information) -- After receiving task requests,
it will automatically query the allocated location and generate the inbound
task. Robot Control System dispatches forklift AGVs to transport the racks
filled with tires to the warehouse for storage. When task completed,
information will feedback to Warehouse Control System, and will be updated with
location information. At the same time, data is synchronized to customer WMS
system.
Automatic outbound: Operators send order-ship-out
requests through ERP system. After receiving the requests, VisionNav Warehouse
Control System will query the location information of the material and generate
warehouse delivery tasks, then docked with Robot Control System to schedule
forklift AGVs to transport the target rack to the outbound area. After
completing the task, it would feedback the information to Warehouse Control
System. After the location information is updated, the data is synchronized to
the customer’s WMS system through the interface. WMS system will display the
rack and the order information on Kanban screen in the warehouse area, so as to
remind the workers to take away and load the truck in time.
【Added
Values】
It innovates the entire supply chain
management process and reduced the intensity of manual work. After the
warehouse upgrades, both warehouse areas can increase storage capacity up to 2
million tires, which is 1.5 times larger than before. It can work 24/7, but in such
nonstop working processes workers being replaced by robots, reducing production
costs and improve working efficiency, perfectly realizing fully automatic and
scientific management of warehousing.
About VisionNav Robotics
VisionNav Robotics, a global leader in industrial driverless
vehicles, is committed to enabling vehicles with driverless technology and
promoting flexible unmanned application in logistics. VisionNav Robotics
provides industrial driverless vehicle products and flexible unmanned logistics
solutions for manufacturing logistics and warehousing logistics. At present,
various types of autonomous forklift and tractor products have been developed
and produced, realizing applications such as up to 9.4m high level storage and
retrieval, up to 2.0m narrow passage storage and retrieval, truck loading and
unloading, and multi-layer stacking, which are widely used in automobile
manufacturing, tire manufacturing, food, petrochemical, e-commerce logistics,
third party logistics, pharmaceutical and many other industries.
