SOTO in use at WAGO

WAGO is the lead­ing sup­plier of elec­tri­cal inter­con­nec­tion, automa­tion and inter­face elec­tronic tech­nolo­gies. In April 2023, SOTO began oper­at­ing at the head­quar­ters in Min­den thanks to the close col­lab­o­ra­tion with Junghein­rich and Mag­a­zino. The mobile robot sup­plies WAGO’s injec­tion mould­ing pro­duc­tion with small load car­ri­ers (SLC, aka: KLT) and trans­ports them autonomously between the ware­house and pro­duc­tion. The goal is to use SOTO to make logis­tics processes within pro­duc­tion more effi­cient and safer.

Read now, how WAGO is har­ness­ing the ben­e­fits of SOTO:

• Auto­mated mate­r­ial flow between injec­tion mould­ing machine and warehouse
• Tote exchanges — full vs. empty — on cost-effec­tive plat­forms, even at dif­fer­ent heights
• Mate­r­ial track­ing with the help of barcodes
• Autonomous nav­i­ga­tion with intel­li­gent controls
• Safe inter­ac­tion with peo­ple and other machines

A Clear Focus on Growth and Future Viability

As an inter­na­tion­ally active com­pany based in Ger­many, WAGO aims to posi­tion itself for growth and the future.

Issues of increas­ing effi­ciency are addressed with tech­ni­cal and auto­mated solu­tions, among other things. As part of the pro­gres­sion towards greater automa­tion, the trial deploy­ment of the mobile robot SOTO com­menced in April 2023 in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Junghein­rich and its sub­sidiary Magazino.

WAGO has been look­ing into the intro­duc­tion of a dri­ver­less trans­port sys­tem for some time in order to imple­ment the mate­r­ial flow to and from the injec­tion mould­ing machines using small load car­ri­ers. The robot SOTO was chosen.

It was imple­mented into the cor­re­spond­ing logis­tics processes in a multi-stage process. Together with the part­ners Junghein­rich and Mag­a­zino, the use case was iter­a­tively expanded and finally suc­cess­fully rolled out to a dou­ble row of injec­tion mould­ing machines.

Chal­lenge: Ensur­ing Smooth Tote Exchange at the Injec­tion Mould­ing Machine

The core chal­lenges for WAGO were the direct machine con­nec­tion as well as the smooth and sim­ple exchance of the SLC at the injec­tion mould­ing machine.

The SOTO sys­tem proved to be a pio­neer­ing solu­tion. SOTO’s active grip­ping tech­nol­ogy using con­veyor belt grip­pers allows the robot to inter­act with low-cost plat­forms for chang­ing the SLCs, thus enabling eco­nom­i­cal scal­ing to a large num­ber of machines.

A WAGO-Con­troller on the machine records the tote’s fill lev­els. The con­trol sys­tem com­mu­ni­cates with the Junghein­rich Logis­tics Inter­face and uses it to request a box exchange. Once SOTO receives a trans­port order, it nav­i­gates to the machine, grabs the full SLC and places an empty tote in the same posi­tion. With the help of bar­codes, mate­r­ial track­ing is ensured at all times.

Safe Inter­ac­tion with Man and Machine

The robot nav­i­gates autonomously through the pro­duc­tion sec­tions with the help of laser scan­ners and 3D cam­era tech­nol­ogy and manoeu­vres around obsta­cles so that it can work par­al­lel to humans.

The large back­pack allows for the stor­age of a vari­ety of small load car­ri­ers, which in turn means that fewer vehi­cles are needed in the area over­all. Using  SLAM tech­nol­ogy (Simul­ta­ne­ous Local­iza­tion & Map­ping Process), the sen­sors not only ensure cor­rect local­iza­tion in the pro­duc­tion hall but also ensure safe oper­a­tion for man and machine at all times.

Clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion takes the team along on the journey.

WAGO is prepar­ing for the chal­lenges of the future with SOTO — It was impor­tant for WAGO to involve its employ­ees in the process of inte­grat­ing SOTO. Trans­parency and open com­mu­ni­ca­tion were empha­sized right from the start. Dur­ing train­ing ses­sions, the empha­sis was not only on how SOTO would alter cur­rent work­flows but also on iden­ti­fy­ing which exist­ing prob­lems it would address and which issues it should not tackle: “It’s explic­itly not about peo­ple los­ing their jobs. Ulti­mately, we want to use robot­ics to help peo­ple in their daily work.” says Thor­ben Epp­mann, Tech­ni­cal Process Engi­neer at WAGO.

Test­ing, Eval­u­at­ing, Opti­miz­ing, Scaling

After a suc­cess­ful trial phase of the SOTO sys­tem in a ded­i­cated “sand­box area” of the pro­duc­tion, WAGO is now expand­ing its fleet to a total of four SOTO robots. Once imple­mented, the fleet will han­dle the fully auto­mated sup­ply and removal of small load car­ri­ers (SLCs, aka: KLTs) to and from the injec­tion mold­ing machines at the company’s headquarters.

“SOTO has proven to be a future-proof solu­tion for our pro­duc­tion logis­tics,” says Thor­ben Epp­mann in a joint state­ment with Junghein­rich and Mag­a­zino.

“Fol­low­ing the pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence dur­ing the trial phase, we are now mov­ing for­ward with expand­ing the fleet. In the future, our employ­ees will be fur­ther relieved of phys­i­cally demand­ing tasks and can focus entirely on value-adding activities.”

We are delighted that SOTO has fully con­vinced WAGO and look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing our strong collaboration.