Fiege relies on Advanced Robotics

Fiege has a stock of 2 mil­lion arti­cles, which are dis­trib­uted through­out Europe. With over 100,000 out­go­ing goods per day, small lot sizes and high cus­tomer demands, they need new solu­tions in order to be able to deliver quickly, flex­i­bly and eco­nom­i­cally in the future as well.

As a third-party logis­tics provider, flex­i­bil­ity is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for Fiege. Dur­ing con­tract terms of three to four years, the needs of their cus­tomers and thus the tasks for Fiege can change con­sid­er­ably. Instead of rigid automa­tion with high invest­ment costs, Fiege there­fore wants an adapt­able and scal­able solu­tion that makes it ready for Indus­try 4.0.

Together with Fiege, Mag­a­zino has taken up this chal­lenge and done pio­neer­ing work: they have fur­ther devel­oped the intel­li­gent TORU order pick­ing robot in a real envi­ron­ment. With 3D cam­eras, pre­cise grip­ping mechan­ics and intel­li­gent nav­i­ga­tion, TORU was inte­grated into the exist­ing ware­house processes and work along­side humans – with great suc­cess. At Fiege in Ibben­bür­gen, shoe pick­ing was thus car­ried out autonomously for the first time any­where in the world. Since then, TORU has taken over the tasks of stor­age and retrieval as well as the dis­tance between the objects to be picked. It com­bines high per­for­mance with flex­i­bil­ity and secu­rity. The han­dover of the shoe boxes is car­ried out via pick-carts: these are autonomously filled by TORU in the out­bound process or emp­tied in the inbound process.

The fleet of TORU robots has grown con­tin­u­ously since the pilot project in 2016 — today nine robots are in daily oper­a­tion at the Ibben­büren site and sup­port the employ­ees on an area of around 1,700 square meters.