AUTOMATED WAREHOUSING USING ROBOTIC FORKLIFTS

摘要

A system for automated inventory management and material handling removes the requirement to operate fully automatically or all-manual using conventional vertical storage and retrieval (S&R) machines. Inventory requests to place palletized material into storage at a specified lot location or retrieve palletized material from a specified lot are resolved into missions for autonomous fork trucks, equivalent mobile platforms, or manual fork truck drivers (and their equipment) that are autonomously or manually executed to effect the request. Automated trucks plan their own movements to execute the mission over the warehouse aisles or roadways sharing this space with manually driven trucks. Automated units drive to planned speed limits, manage their loads (stability control), stop, go, and merge at intersections according human driving rules, use on-board sensors to identify static and dynamic obstacles, and human traffic, and either avoid them or stop until potential collision risk is removed.

主权项

1. A system for automated inventory management and material handling, comprising:
one or more automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles, each including:
a) drive-by-wire operation with automated and manual controls,b) a location determining subsystem,c) a proximity obstacle detection and avoidance subsystem, andd) a subsystem to support automatic traversal from a pick-up location to one or more drop-off locations, and an inventory systems controller, including:
a) database of inventory stored in a storage facility,b) a maps database associated with the layout of the storage facility,c) a database of the automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles, andd) an inventory request server that accepts inventory requests, selects an available vehicle, and sends the vehicle on a mission plan using the maps database to carry out the inventory request.