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“Today, the desired book, toy or household appliance can be purchased by a click only – thanks to online mail order business and smart logistics. The bottleneck in logistics, however, is the high-bay store, where many picking and detection processes cannot yet be executed automatically by robots. At the Amazon Robotics Challenge in Nagoya, Japan, the IFL PiRo team of KIT demonstrated how future warehousing may work. First participation in the international competition was crowned by an excellent 7th place in the overall ranking. “In an exciting week with three intensive competition days we mastered several challenges and learned a lot,” says Kai Markert of KIT’s Institute for Materials Handling and Logistics and IFL PiRo team captain. “It was a big success for our young team to be able to compete with the best in the world in Japan.” The IFL PiRo team presented with an innovative shelf concept. Instead of arranging the goods in a conventional shelf, the objects are placed in mobile boxes arranged horizontally around the central robot arm. Some of the boxes can be moved by the robot like drawers, thus allowing for a multistorey arrangement. Although load capacity of this system appears to be smaller than that of a shelf system of the same area at first glance, the capacity can be increased easily. In the future warehouse, a second robot might work as a feeder and bring the required boxes or remove those that are no longer needed. “As today’s warehouse systems have reached their technical limits, we wanted to develop a completely new system for the 21st century in order to make full use of the advantages of the robot gripper,” Markert points out.”

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