FEATURE Automotive Supply Chain


Time for the automotive industry to get parts- smart


Driverless forklifts are the perfect part-handling solution for the automotive industry, writes Jason Zhang, Head of Sales for Europe at VisionNav Robotics


T


he automotive industry was an early adopter of automated production technology; for several decades, robots were


partitioned off from human workers, busily carrying out welding, assembly, painting and part-transfer tasks. With the development of more


dexterous robotic technology capable of undertaking the jobs that had previously been performed by human hands, the use of automation is only likely to grow across the sector, as manufacturers seek greater control over the entire production process. The handling of car parts is often one of the most dangerous parts of a vehicle assembly line for human employees, so, given the automotive sector’s willingness to embrace automation it is perhaps a little surprising that, in many cases, the vital role of delivering component parts from the warehouse to the production line is entrusted to traditional human-operated forklift trucks or tow tractors.


Driverless forklifts


Accidents involving materials-handling equipment – such as forklifts colliding with pedestrian workers, the building or production machinery – remain a common occurrence in many industry sectors and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, responsibility for the mishap is deemed to lie with the truck operator. Apart from any human cost arising


48 September 2022 | Automation


from injured assembly line workers, forklift accidents can have an extremely detrimental impact on production flow rates – particularly if assembly stations or the parts that the forklift was transporting are damaged. Driverless forklift truck technology


greatly reduces the risk of trucks causing damage to goods or people, however. Operator-free forklifts undertake every type of task that would be expected of a traditional manually- operated forklift, including vehicle loading and unloading, pallet put-away and retrieval, in both standard and very narrow aisle racking configurations, as well as pallet and stillage movements throughout the warehouse and assembly facility. VisionNav’s operator-free forklifts and tow tractors use a vehicle-mounted camera to sense the environment in which the vehicle is operating. Information concerning the structural design and layout of the facility where trucks are used is stored as offline maps, which the visual navigation system matches with real-time images received from the camera, to navigate the forklifts efficiently and safely around the building. VisionNav driverless trucks are in operation at several automotive component manufacturing facilities. For example, a China-based supplier of gearboxes and transmitters uses its driverless trucks to block stack cages of finished goods within its outbound


goods area prior to their delivery to the manufacturer’s site. Meanwhile a manufacturer of car door panels – also based in the Far East – relies on VisionNav’s driverless forklift system to pick and stack some 700 cages containing panels prior to being loaded onto delivery vehicles, every day.


Easily deployed


The technology at the heart of VisionNav’s range of driverless robots is quick and easy to install and brings a rapid return on investment. The highly- flexible technology allows driverless industrial trucks to be adopted with minimal disruption to a site’s existing intralogistics process and, typically, ROI is achieved after some 18-24 months. Driver-free forklifts deliver rapid


return on investment because, not only do they offer improved production performance and reduced accident rates, they also allow the increasingly costly forklift operator’s wages to be removed from the user’s overheads. And, with the forklift driver often representing the biggest cost when it comes to running a lift truck fleet, for many companies operating in the automotive space and other sectors, this is a considerable incentive to go driver-free.


CONTACT:


VisionNav Robotics www.VisionNav.cn


automationmagazine.co.uk


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