So, one of the things that people are always wondering about is automation and
robotics and so on in warehousing. If you're not wondering about it
you should be in supply chain. So, Mal Walker has recently been over to Promat
big show in the US and Mal you've put together a whole bunch of videos for us
to show us what's happening. What kind of things we're gonna see? Yes, I have Rob
and I'm glad you asked because I went to Promat and I saw autonomous robots
yeah I saw task to person picking. I've seen lots of goods to person systems.
Great! I've seen cross belts orders and goodness knows what so there's a heap of
them I've show all these little videos and we're going to put some of those
coming right up and it might be you know more than one video you got to watch
that so coming right up.
Malon Walker here from logistics bureau we're just happy to look at an auto
store system auto store is a robotic system that picks and moves totes you
can see here the totes are stacked on top of each other and these robots move
around on top of the store and place and pick the totes as required then they
move them over to a good to the person picking station which is shown just here
this system has great space utilization and is very scalable and has been a
great success it is so successful but at the moment about four or five companies
market Porto store it really is a great system and is getting a lot of take-up
in Australia the United States and Europe as well so this is it's our shoes
order that we design a building we see those gray little plastic pieces
of called shoes what we do is we wanted to hear the box like you see here the
shoes actually pushed the box off on to that differently the great thing about
the shoe sorter is it's very diverse you can have a wide range of box you just
add more shoes on to that burden if you need it take those shoes away what sort
of a sort ation give you a vision yeah what's like how many sorts oh my head
Wow per hour per hour yeah I would want to double-check that for sure about
right yeah and over in this tunnel you got a robot putting in paperwork is that
our document inserter yes sir yes sir we're scanned usually an LPN or a label
on here know what the carton is and then you can see the robot there we send that
to our warehouse management Mars control system it'll print the appropriate
manifest or whatever in so you want to put the box and the robotic arm grabs it
from the printer and slips it into the car
and I have my friend Chris here from Locust say hi Chris hello yeah so Chris
can you tell us a little bit about what this particular robot does and how it
works thank you so with Lucas we're really bringing the
task to the person instead of the goods station over their coats and the robots
received their directions from the warehouse management system then the
robots go to the various places along the mission list shows me what it's
looking for what it's asking for I can tap this and see a close-up picture of
this but say yep okay I want to scan the item
so now if I scan the whole nine
from quantity 3
and I need two more responses
ah it's a big order here okay it's keeping you busy obviously yeah and now
it's going away that's going to packing station house it's finished all of its
orders and it's telling me that I need to go next to Isles to or oils to
because that's where the next robot is waiting
okay so the system then tells you where you've got to go and there's another
robot waiting there for you - exactly so I never have to question I never have to
walk the halls I know exactly where I need to go next so that's fantastic so
what sort of picking rates can you get out of that robot so generally if you
compare it to many of the peerage with a pulsar I've done we get to to 3x yeah
you service ok 950 us per month and I can add on as many robots as I need for
that operation yep and in fact we have a short turns
as well for your peak so you can have 15 robots every day of the year and then
during the holiday crunch you get up another 15 just to help me get through
that
I'm just looking at a machine called the shore sword which is a machine that
sorts small products into bins fantastic piece of technology and I've got byron
from OPIC say hello byron hello okay byron now this is a fantastic
machine can you tell me what it does so it's a single item sorter for sorting
packages that have been batch picked or wave picked that are going to be sorted
for final output for order fulfillment typically this will be used for
e-commerce order fulfillment is probably the
biggest user again what happens is that you have warehouse people that will do
batch picking our way picking they'll bring those items to the induction
station those items will be inducted on a single item sort our sorter talks to
the WMS background back-end system it will present that item to the WMS get
instructions from the WMS of what location it's going to it will fulfill
that order then a sweeper will complete that order for
can we come around and just see the the f-word of this yeah so the product is is
dispatched into these bins correctly so as the items are dropped on the
induction station the eye box will then take those items to a bin location
identified by the WMS when one of those bin locations has its all of its items
put there it'll get an indicator light indicating that it's an order complete
right then another person will come what we call a sweeper will come by empty
that bin into the shipping container and then clear it for the next order
so this sorter our maximum output throughput rate is 2,400 items per hour
very good yeah so that would be for a full length system which is about twice
the length of the one you're looking okay and that's with one one person
dropping at a continuous rate so you get output of about 2400 miles right and how
many beans or order types can you actually hold in the system so we have
different size bins we have four inch bins 7 inch bins and 12 inch bins a full
length system with all four inch bins you can have up to five hundred and
thirty locations
you