MU_2018_JanuaryFebruary-HR

38 MACHINERY UPDATE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 www.machineryupdate.co.uk
Feature: Warehousing and logistics
A German project
is making vehicles
see for themselves
Arecent smart warehouse
logistics project has
made use of driverless
vehicles guided with
Basler Time-of-Flight
3D cameras to overcome the
limitations of these vehicles.
These limitations include the
trucks having to follow certain
routes and not having the capacity
to react flexibly to change.
To date driverless transport
systems have been very timeintensive
and expensive to set up.
But, the introduction of Industry
4.0 brings the promise of new
approaches and ways of providing
machines with the innate
human ability to orient them and
understand simple commands.
The drive-less ‘reach trucks’
developed as part of the research
project in Germany, are intelligent
and learn to orient and adapt
themselves based on their
environment. They begin by
taking part in an initial human
guided tour of the facility to note
all aspects of their environment.
Communication with the vehicle
is achieved easily using speech or
gesture commands to instruct
the vehicle.
This experimental technology
can be used for identifying
transportable goods and
permitting them to be picked,
transported and deposited at
their destination through smart
autonomous reach trucks.
The vehicles are very easy to
operate meaning one single
warehouse worker can control
multiple vehicles at once.
Using Time-of-Flight camera
technology is providing the means
The Time-of-Flight 3D camera is used
Seeing best
way ahead
If a worker issues
a command to
‘store this pallet
on shelf three’,
for instance, the
vehicle can
interpret the
spoken word and
also any gestures
to capture 3D shape and volume
measurements which is ideal for
driverless-vehicles technology.
Both light source and image
acquisition are synchronised in
such a way that the distances can
be extracted and calculated from
the image data. Basler, the Time-of
Flight camera manufacturer,
describes the principle as similar
to the way dolphins use sonar to
navigate, except the camera uses
light and not sound.
Each reach truck utilises three
Basler 3D Time-of-Flight cameras.
Each individual camera takes
a three dimensional note of its
environment, ensuring that its
spatial perception is correct. Two
cameras are mounted on the roof
to allow for free movement in all
directions. The reach truck takes
note of any landmarks within its
environment, establishing an
internal map. Any changes in
the environment are immediately
noticed, such as when a shelving
unit is re-positioned or any barriers
are located in its path and reacts to
these problems appropriately.
If there was a barrier blocking
its path, they would edge around
it in the same way a human would.
The third camera used in this
project is a modified Basler
Time-of-Flight camera mounted on
the reach arm. This is required to
ensure accuracy when picking up
pallets, says Basler UK distributor
Multipix. The 3D data delivered by
this camera ensures that the reach
truck navigates precisely into the
pallet on the first try, without
the need for human guidance.
T 01730 233332
W www.multipix.com