Mag­a­zino receives “Best Prod­uct” award at Logi­MAT trade fair

Stuttgart, March 13, 2018 | Startup Mag­a­zino was awarded the “Best Prod­uct” prize for its newly devel­oped SOTO robot at the Logi­MAT trade fair. Mag­a­zino wins the award in the cat­e­gory “Order pick­ing, con­veyor, lift­ing and stor­age technology”.

Using 3D cam­era tech­nol­ogy, the fully autonomous SOTO robot can grab objects such as car­tons from a con­veyor belt, store them on the vehi­cle, nav­i­gate to the des­ti­na­tion and pre­cisely place the car­tons in shelv­ing racks. This makes SOTO the first per­cep­tion-con­trolled robot in the world to com­bine this spec­trum of capa­bil­i­ties in a sin­gle solu­tion. The award-win­ning robot is to be used pri­mar­ily in dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters for fash­ion logis­tics. A fur­ther field of appli­ca­tion is the sup­ply of small load car­ri­ers in pro­duc­tion logistics.

The advan­tages are obvi­ous: Many man­ual work processes that were pre­vi­ously too com­plex can now be auto­mated flex­i­bly and scal­ably for the first time. This results in extended oper­at­ing times, smooth­ing of order peaks and a reduc­tion in oper­at­ing and process costs. Above all, how­ever, SOTO relieves employ­ees of ergonom­i­cally unfa­vor­able tasks.

“We are very proud that our SOTO robot con­vinced the jury,” says Lukas Zanger, co-founder and COO of Mag­a­zino, with sat­is­fac­tion. “This award also makes it clear that per­cep­tion-con­trolled robot­ics has arrived in intral­o­gis­tics. Flex­i­ble automa­tion with robots will be stan­dard in many ware­houses in a few years’ time”.

SOTO can han­dle objects up to a size of 600 x 400 x 400 mil­lime­ters and a weight of 15 kilo­grams with its adap­tive grip­per. Depend­ing on its size, up to eight car­tons can be stowed in its inte­grated inter­me­di­ate stor­age. The lift­ing device allows objects to be picked up and deliv­ered from both sides at grip­ping heights of 5 cm to 250 cm. Cer­ti­fied laser scan­ners enable not only autonomous nav­i­ga­tion, but also safe oper­a­tion par­al­lel to employ­ees. Via WLan, the robot com­mu­ni­cates in real time with the mer­chan­dise man­age­ment sys­tem. Net­worked via a cloud, SOTO exchanges cur­rent maps and expe­ri­ences with cer­tain sit­u­a­tions with other robots. This enables them to learn from each other and thus con­stantly improve.

The idea for the SOTO robot was also born from numer­ous dis­cus­sions at pre­vi­ous Logi­MAT trade fairs. At the Logi­MAT 2017 the con­cept of the robot SOTO was pre­sented to the pub­lic. A few months later, a first pro­to­type was cre­ated. At Logi­MAT 2018, the pre-series model of the robot will be exhib­ited for the first time.