4 Ways to Optimize the Internal Transport of Materials

According to academic papers, material handling consumes 55% of field space, up to 70% of operating cost and up to 87% of production time in a typical manufacturing facility or warehouse.

According to academic papers, material handling consumes 55% of field space, up to 70% of operating cost and up to 87% of production time in a typical manufacturing facility or warehouse.

Therefore, apart from deploying automation equipment to speed up production, it is also necessary for factories or warehouses to invest in autonomous mobile robots and logistics vision solutions to optimize their internal material transportation ways, i.e. intralogistics ways, in the following four typical sections.

1. Deploy AMRs to dock seamlessly with elevators

In a traditional factory or warehouse, people used to use pallet trucks or stackers to transport materials across floors. This requires experienced operators who are not easy to find under labor shortage. With autonomous mobile robots, materials can be transferred automatically across floors with high efficiency.

Moreover, the Hikrobot AMR solution seamlessly docks with elevators via software to realize fully automatic across-floor material transportation. The elevator opens the door and transports AMRs to the designated floor automatically. With the self-developed robot control system (RCS), maps on different floors are managed together to make sure that the robot dispatching seamlessly docks with the across-floor navigation.

2. Deploy AMRs to transport materials to production lines

Traditional manufacturing facilities heavily rely on the manual handling of materials from warehouses to production lines. In this way, operators are more easily to get inappropriate materials and more operators are needed in order to keep fast-paced production and high productivity. Moreover, raw materials or semi-finished products are usually placed directly on the floor to be easily fetched, which occupies lots of field space.

Now with AMR solutions, raw materials or semi-finished products can be stacked vertically and orderly with high density, greatly increasing the field utilization rate. The AMR solution takes control of all the production sections and automatically transfers the required materials to designated workstations, smoothing the whole workflow and ensuring timeliness and accuracy of material replenishment.

Different types of materials need different types of carriers. With efforts in mobile robot technology, Hikrobot has launched a series of products, Latent Mobile Robot (LMR), Forklift Mobile Robot (FMR), Carton Transfer Unit (CTU), Conveyor Mobile Robot (CMR) and Heavy Mobile Robot (HMR) to cope with various types of carries. All of the robots can be under cluster control of the self-developed robot control system (RCS) to realize optimal task allocation, multi-robots path planning and traffic management, covering diverse application scenarios.

3. Deploy AMRs to dock seamlessly with mechanical arms

With the booming need to achieve higher productivity with lower costs, manufacturers nowadays are looking to upgrade automation to increase work efficiency. For example, mechanical arms are usually used to automatically pack and palletize finished products to the vertical warehouse or depalletize finished products onto the belt.

Together with autonomous mobile robots, the whole outbound delivery process is automated with even higher efficiency. Take depalletizing for example, when operators send out a task on the software, a pallet of finished products will be automatically transferred beside to side of mechanical arms by the AMR. The AMR can communicate with the mechanical arm via the warehouse control system. After depalletizing, AMR will automatically move away the empty pallet.

4. Deploy AMRs & logistics vision solutions to help with picking and outbound delivery

Picking and outbound delivery are the most critical sections of the warehousing business. In traditional warehouses, pickers on site need to spend lots of time walking and looking for the wanted goods, consuming huge labor intensity but with low working efficiency and accuracy.

However, with AMR goods-to-person solutions, pickers on site just need to stand alongside workstations and wait for mobile robots to transport goods to them. The working strength is lowered and picking efficiency is greatly enhanced. And the Hikrobot warehouse management system (iWMS) analyzes orders and makes smart batching to improve the rack hit rate, picking accuracy and overall work efficiency.

Finished product info gathering and traceability are significant for enhancing outbound delivery efficiency and maximizing warehouse throughput, especially for e-commerce and 3PL companies with omnichannel sales. Under this circumstance, it is necessary to deploy logistics vision solutions to deal with package sortation, distribution and outbound delivery. In order to track packages with real-time videos during outbound delivery, a CCTV system can be installed in the warehouse to dock with vision products, belts and AMRs.

Hikrobot offers integrated intralogistics solutions combining AMR and machine vision technologies to build smart factories or warehouses for customers. And our intralogistics solutions support docking with CCTV systems to improve warehouse management and ensure property safety.

Take the latest benchmark practice for example, Hikrobot Goods-to-Person solution, singulation system and six-sided barcode reading system were deployed in a world-class cosmetics manufacturer, Beukay Cosmetics, to help them realize fully automated sorting and distribution, increasing their average daily order shipments by 6 times, reducing labour intensity and operating costs. Find out more:

https://www.hikrobotics.com/en/mobilerobot/bestpractice/detail?id=24