The aim of the project is to automate pallet transportation over longer distances between the warehouse and production, which was previously carried out manually with the help of a manual pallet truck ("ant"). By integrating the autonomous transport robot, the employees currently responsible for transportation can be reassigned to other value-adding tasks.

Eight transport orders per hour

Unlike conventional pallet trucks, the Proant 576 does not require fuel or lead-acid batteries. The vehicle is powered by modern lithium-ion battery technology, which can be used for between seven and eight hours when fully charged. If there are no transport orders, the vehicle automatically drives to the charging station. Within one hour, the vehicle completes up to eight transport orders and is able to communicate with the automatic door and airlock system in the production environment. To avoid collisions with the oncoming car and truck traffic, a traffic light system was used to regulate right of way.

The automotive supplier employs more than 200,000 people at more than 400 locations in 61 countries and is a listed German group based in Hanover. The company is the largest automotive supplier in the world after Bosch and has developed over the years from a pure tire manufacturer to an automotive supplier. At the Pisa Fauglia site (Automotive division), the company develops injectors for gasoline engines.

Previously, when transporting pallets between the warehouse and the production hall using the hand pallet truck, employees always had to cover a transport route of around 70 meters, which was interrupted by various doors and locks on the one hand and a normal road for car and truck traffic on the other. This resulted in regular delays and waiting times.

Vehicle orients itself in the warehouse

Insystems has developed a material flow solution that also fits into the company's demanding environment. The driverless pallet truck picks up pallets fully automatically and navigates completely autonomously along virtual lines to its destination based on an environment contour that has been taught in once. In doing so, the vehicle orients itself to existing contours (machines or walls). In the warehouse area, however, the environment often changes, which means that stable contours are not available for localizing the vehicle. For this reason, two reflectors were attached to existing shelves. These reflectors represent orientation markers that the vehicle can use to robustly locate itself.

The Proant AGV 576 is mainly used at the Pisa site to handle two types of transport: On the one hand for transporting Euro pallets (1,200 by 800 millimetres up to a weight of 1,200 kilograms), and on the other hand for transporting ISO pallets (1,200 by 1,000 millimetres up to a weight of 1,200 kilograms). The path width in the production environment is around 1.9 meters. The speed of the vehicle must be reduced to approx. 0.7 meters per second in order to be able to perform an emergency stop in good time. If the path width is reduced to less than 1.8 meters, the speed is reduced to a minimum of 0.3 meters per second.