July 2019

| 34 | July 2019 www.smartmachinesandfactories.com | TECHNOLOGIES | As manufacturers embrace a lean approach to operations, executives are evaluating their opportunities to continually optimise productivity. Smart Machines & Factories reports. adaptable without additional cost or disruption to processes, not to mention safe for operation around employees. That flexibility also means that automated material handling must be easy to learn, program, deploy, and redeploy in-house to ensure that the chosen approach can cost-effectively keep up-to-date with requirements. Traditional automated guided vehicles (AGVs) move materials using fixed routes that are guided by permanent wires, magnetic strips, or sensors embedded in the plant floor. However, those systems are inflexible, expensive, and disruptive for dynamic manufacturing floors. If manufacturing processes change, the facility must be updated again—and if people or material temporarily blocks the AGV’s Autonomous Mobile Robots maintain competitiveness E ven in highly automated facilities, material handling is often still a manual, inefficient process, but automating material transportation to reduce production bottlenecks and deploy valuable human workers more effectively has been a challenge. Decision-makers have been faced with expensive investments in automated guided vehicles (AGVs), which don’t provide the flexibility needed in today’s agile manufacturing processes. But new sensor and software technologies make autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) ideal for unpredictable or changing production layouts and dynamic work environments. Agile manufacturing is allowing companies to adapt to fast-changing market demands and maintain their competitiveness, but on-time delivery of materials and assemblies within those facilities continues to be a challenge. Manual transportation requires workers to leave their stations to push carts loaded with materials between manufacturing processes and the stockroom, and can result in production backlogs and idle workers as they wait for assemblies and parts to be delivered. Automating this process has been a challenge. Plant set-up is often dynamic, with new production cells and processes that must be supported and people, equipment, pallets, and other obstacles can appear in what used to be open passageways. Any automated material transportation approach must be flexible and easily