Mobile materials handling robot is self-guiding
April 30th 2008 12:01 am By Web Development in India
A vision-guided, self-navigating, industrial mobile robot has been designed specifically for material handling in manufacturing, warehousing and distribution plants.
Seegrid Corporation has introduced its autonomous tugger, the GT3 The vehicle employs Seegrid’s Industrial Mobile Robotics (IMR) technology, which enables it to move through manufacturing, warehousing and distribution operations making use of stereo cameras to build a reliable 3D map of the environment
The GT3 then uses the map and its own ‘reasoning’ ability to navigate a predetermined path to complete its assigned transport task.
“The GT3 is our first machine introduced to do facility-wide transport in the material handling industry,” said Scott Friedman, CEO of Seegrid.
“We couldn’t be more pleased with the positive reception it has gotten from dealers and customers”.
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* No physical guidance - without wire guides, magnets or lasers, the GT3 transports materials and finished goods around a plant.
It frees up skilled employees by taking care of such tasks as pulling carts, delivering palletised materials and positioning supplies in tight areas.
The vehicle is highly flexible and can be implemented quickly and easily with no workflow disruption.
The GT3 frees up workers to focus on higher-valued tasks, increases productivity by constantly enforcing the work pace, fosters safety discipline and reduces labor, accidents and injury costs.
It has the lowest total cost of ownership and the highest Return on Investment (ROI) in the material handling industry, said Seegrid.
Senior vice president of distribution and logistics at Giant Eagle, Larry Baldauf, said: “What excites Giant Eagle about Seegrid’s technology is that it is incredibly sophisticated machinery yet it is easy to use and very durable with high reliability.
We look forward to Seegrid’s future generations of products which we believe could change the future of material handling”.
Supervisor of materials control at Daimler Trucks, Donnie Dixon, commented about GT3 flexibility: “We were looking at an AGV but didn’t want the wire guides, magnets and lasers that come with it - we needed flexibility to be able to change the routes easily and frequently, and the GT3 does that for us”.
He added: “We use the GT3 to continually supply parts to our assembly stations.
We love its versatility: we are able to simply change and perform multiple routes for our first and second shifts and do a completely different route for our third shift - just that flexibility alone provided us real value”.
Vice president of Customer Service at GENCO Supply Chain Solutions, Gary Siefert, said: “Our facility is a product returns processing center for Sears where, as you might imagine, we process a large volume of packaging waste which needs to be cleared and moved to disposal areas to keep the operations productive.
We use the GT3 to move the packaging material waste from numerous work stations spread throughout our facility to a central disposal point.
The GT3 is constantly traveling along its designated route, driving productivity and freeing up our employees to perform other more valuable work.
After utilizing the GT3 for a number of weeks we were able to determine that the ROI on the GT3 was exceptional”.
* About Seegrid Corporation - Seegrid brings a new class of affordable industrial mobile robots to the material handling industry that operate reliably and safely in dynamic warehouse, distribution and manufacturing environments.
Seegrid’s robots differ from today’s AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) in that the company’s IMR technology is the first to provide early-stage capabilities of autonomous robot behavior with Sense, Move, Analyze, Interact and Repeat capabilities.
The result - AGV-like competence but with greater flexibility at a considerably lower cost.
IMR-enabled robots provide WalkThroughThenWork capabilities, providing an operator with the ability to simply and easily instruct the robot along a desired path, adding behaviors such as horns and stop stations, usually in minutes.
Seegrid robots literally come straight off the truck, an operator quickly inputs the path and the robot is immediately productive.
