Automation,
Efficiency increase
It is indisputable that modern companies should invest in automated or autonomous transport systems sooner rather than later if they want to continue to be successful and competitive in the future given how crucial intralogistics procedures are to their day-to-day operations.
This is due to a rationale that is both straightforward and complex.
By relieving your staff of tedious, low-value-added, and potentially dangerous and/or physically demanding tasks with a correspondingly high risk of accidents and illness, there is a significant increase in the overall level of safety in your operations from which both you and your employees’ benefit.
This directly affects a company's ability to:
+ boost efficiency
+ reduce costs
+ minimize employee fluctuation, and
+ gain competitive advantages in future-oriented markets through greater flexibility.
However, one of the decisive questions is how quickly and at what investment cost you can expect these positive effects.
Success with AGILOX without process changes
Changing or fundamentally restructuring existing processes and warehouse structures is time-consuming and involves slowdowns or even downtime, which have a direct impact on the bottom line. In addition, automated transportation systems tied to physical or virtual guardrails require significant preliminary construction work, which is also required – again – in the event of production line changes.
This is where a major advantage of our AGILOX AMRs - Autonomous Mobile Robots – comes into play: They can easily be integrated into current processes, either individually or as a fleet, without the need for any structural changes to the facility layout.
The only technical and spatial requirements are:
- Charging station
AGILOX AMRs require special charging stations with the appropriate power supply for their operation. The vehicles automatically approach the stations according to battery requirements and order situation. In fleet operations, each vehicle should have its separate charging station, which allows each AMR to act independently as soon as a certain charge level is reached without waiting times.
To accomplish this, AGILOX AMRs are built with the least amount of power consumption in mind. As a result, charging just takes a few minutes per working hour. After recharging, our AMRs instantly reintegrate into the active processes.
- WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network)
Another fundamental prerequisite for using one or more AGILOX AMRs is the availability of a strong and reliable WLAN infrastructure over the whole operational region where AMRs are deployed.
- Floor conditions
AGILOX AMRs are ground-based transport vehicles. Even though they can be set to operate on various production or storage levels with the aid of freight elevators, they are unable to bridge height disparities like staircases or even floor gaps on their own and instead rely on even, smooth floors.
- Warehouse Layout and Aisle Structure
Due to their innovative omnidirectional drives, AGILOX AMRs can work in much smaller spaces than traditional forklifts and can complete their transport moves with minimal space requirements. This guarantees the best possible utilization of the warehouse area and layout. The only requirement is that, depending on the vehicle, the minimum aisle width is not undercut. Any fine-tuning regarding these minimum requirements for our AGILOX AMRs can be discussed by you with our sales team.
After that, thanks to the innovative technological AGILOX features, it's a quick process.
Plug & Play!
Thanks to the AGILOX swarm intelligence, or more specifically, our proprietary X-SWARM TECHNOLOGY, the first vehicle of a swarm can be put into service in less than 12 hours once all fundamental requirements have been fulfilled. The process is easy: Just move it through the warehouse or manufacturing facility, simply by using a smartphone or tablet. Our AMR records every route and builds a virtual map of the room's configuration. Then, when it comes to adding other AMRs, they will automatically sync their records and will be operational and fully functional in 15 minutes!
From this point on, all AGILOX AMRs in the swarm are in constant contact and communication with each other, checking each other's current workload, distributing jobs autonomously, and transmitting information to each other about any obstacles that need to be avoided or bypassed using an independently recalculated route. AGILOX AMRs are designed to integrate quickly and simply into current systems and architectures.
You can learn more by downloading and reading our free factsheet, which is available here. From there, you can access in depth articles like this one on each of the issues outlined there.
