China's food industry has huge development potential and huge market demand. Applying intelligent manufacturing to the field of food machinery can reduce human and material costs for enterprises. Solving the current high labor costs and recruitment difficulties, and realizing the intelligentization of food production and food enterprise management are important ways and effective methods for the transformation and upgrading of China's food industry.
Recently, Multiway Robotics has teamed up with a well-known food company to jointly create smart storage. With the help of new technology, Multiway realizes the automatic or manual palletizing of finished products to the warehouse docking station, which improves the operation efficiency. Multiway Robotics uses counterbalanced unmanned forklifts as the carrier and is equipped with a self-developed complete upper-level system. At the same time, we specially selected: the warehouse location detection, shape detection, and tray posture recognition functions of the Skyeye system to enhance the flexibility of the on-site program and reduce process constraints. The project status is as follows:
1. Project scenario of Multiway Robotics: The finished products are automatically or manually palletized and automatically transported to the docking station of the warehouse.
2. Handling materials: whole food.
3. Handling process: palletizing line/manual palletizing→stacking hangar elevator.
4. Project pain points:
(1) Relying on purely manual operations, with small space and slower pickup of goods;
(2) The conveyor line and the elevator have high docking requirements, and the manual operation is labor-intensive;
(3) Three shifts of personnel, repetitive manual operations, and rising costs year after year;
(4) Manual palletizing is arbitrary, the appearance of entering the three-dimensional warehouse is unqualified, and the return rate is high.
5. Solutions:
Product selection: counterbalanced unmanned forklift MW-SE08;
System import: warehouse location detection + shape detection + pallet posture recognition function of Skyeye system + whole field planning.
In addition, the project value is realized as follows:
1. Unmanned transportation is very efficient and can meet the needs in time
The food company's warehouse mainly relies on manual operations, with small working space and slow picking and unloading of goods. In the past, the staff had to move the finished products to the docking station of the warehouse. Conveyor lines and elevators have high docking accuracy requirements, personnel work in three shifts, and repetitive manual operations are labor intensive. In this regard, Multiway Robotics selects a counterbalanced unmanned forklift based on the actual situation on the site to achieve precise, efficient, and unmanned handling operations. At the same time, Multiway Robotics adopts the dual mode of automatic charging and manual battery replacement, which solves the problem of handling efficiency in the off-season and peak seasons.
2. Warehouse location monitoring, traceable, early warning, and controllable
The finished product enters the three-dimensional warehouse, the appearance is unqualified during the manual operation, and the return rate is high. In this regard, Multiway Robotics introduced the "location detection" and "shape detection" functions of the Skyeye system to monitor the shape and status of the goods in the palletizing location in real time. The system can open up various production processes, realize the traceability, early warning, and controllability of production data, dynamic monitoring of warehouse locations, docking with the back-end system, and realizing real-time management of warehouse locations.
3. Pallet posture recognition to enhance the flexibility of the overall project
Goods need to be transported and palletized to a three-dimensional warehouse, and manual palletizing is more random. Multiway Robotics's tray gesture recognition function solves this problem well. Based on vision and deep learning, the program can quickly lock the position of the goods, achieve aggressive picking and release, greatly reducing the labor intensity of manual alignment, and improving the flexibility of the overall project process.
4. Optimize the process, improve efficiency and reduce costs
Managers can personally participate in the design and configuration of the system to clear out the inefficient production management processes that are difficult to handle, optimize, and upgrade within the enterprise. The system breaks data barriers, realizes a high level of information circulation among "people, warehouses, and goods", gives full play to the value of data, and improves the effectiveness and utilization of data. Managers can grasp more real-time and comprehensive production data, so as to make reasonable decisions on product quality monitoring and cost control.
