VEGA

Com­pletely auto­mated: From the ware­house to the assem­bly station

VEGA Grieshaber KG employs more than 1,850 peo­ple world­wide, 800 of them at its head­quar­ters in Schiltach in the Black For­est. Here, for more than 60 years, solu­tions have been cre­ated for demand­ing mea­sure­ment tasks in chem­i­cal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal plants, in the food indus­try as well as in drink­ing water sup­ply, in sewage treat­ment plants and land­fills, in min­ing and power gen­er­a­tion, on oil rigs, ships and in air­craft. VEGA is active in more than 80 coun­tries with sub­sidiaries and sales partners.

While assem­bly lines in the man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try are highly auto­mated today, the sup­ply of replen­ish­ments is still mostly done man­u­ally. Route trains or sim­ple Auto­mated Guided Vehi­cles (AGVs) often do not really scale, as man­ual labor is required again in each case dur­ing load­ing or unloading.

KLT pick-up + trans­port + deliv­ery = one solution

SOTO 2 com­bines the ele­men­tary process steps in a sin­gle, fully autonomous solu­tion: the pickup of KLTs of dif­fer­ent sizes, the autonomous trans­port of sev­eral KLTs from source to sink, and the deliv­ery to flow racks at dif­fer­ent heights. The col­lec­tion of emp­ties and the rota­tion of small load car­ri­ers by 90° to 180° are also part of the new robot’s reper­toire of capabilities.

As part of a devel­op­ment part­ner­ship between VEGA and Mag­a­zino, close coop­er­a­tion already took place dur­ing the pro­to­type phase of the SOTO robot, for exam­ple in the devel­op­ment of the grip­per. Dur­ing the pilot phase in 2021 the use in the later work­ing envi­ron­ment was tested and both sides could gain expe­ri­ences. Begin­ning of 2024 a order of two more robots fol­lowed to con­tin­u­ously automa­tise the mate­r­ial supply.

Inte­grated into exist­ing processes

For all object move­ments, SOTO receives trans­port orders via the via­dat ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem from via­s­tore and trans­par­ently reports the sta­tus of the move­ment at any time. On the basis of the retrieval groups ejected for SOTO at the miniload, the robot inde­pen­dently forms tours in which it dis­trib­utes full loads in the pro­duc­tion area and picks up emp­ties. With the help of laser scan­ners and 3D cam­era tech­nol­ogy, the robot nav­i­gates autonomously through the var­i­ous pro­duc­tion sec­tions, even in nar­row places and at inter­sec­tions that are dif­fi­cult to see. The sen­sors not only ensure cor­rect local­iza­tion in the pro­duc­tion hall via the SLAM process, but also guar­an­tee safe oper­a­tion for man and machine at all times.

The SOTO robot is intended for a total of three dif­fer­ent processes at VEGA:

1. Trans­port of mate­r­ial from the auto­mated small parts ware­house to the line.
2. Inter­nal trans­port from line to line
3. Return of emp­ties from the line to the col­lec­tion point.

The focus is still on people

Mag­a­zino places par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on easy setup and oper­a­tion by the cus­tomer. To this end, Mag­a­zino sup­plies the robot with all the nec­es­sary tools to oper­ate it fully.

Close coop­er­a­tion is also main­tained with regard to the trans­fer sta­tions: Mod­u­lar stan­dard work­sta­tion mod­ules for one-piece flow assem­bly cells were devel­oped together with the com­pany ASSTEC. It places the ergonomic needs of the employee at VEGA in the fore­ground. These include, in par­tic­u­lar, elec­tri­cal height adjusta­bil­ity of the rack and work sur­face, excel­lent illu­mi­na­tion, best-point mate­r­ial pro­vi­sion and opti­mized grip­ping areas for employees.

At the same time each shelf com­part­ment has to be reli­ably iden­ti­fied and tar­geted by the robot con­sid­er­ing the height adjusta­bil­ity — a capa­bil­ity that dif­fer­en­ti­ate the robot SOTO 2 from a lot of the other solu­tions on the mar­ket. Adapter plates have been devel­oped for the trans­fer of the KLT between robtos and shelfs, which allows for a robust admit­tance and deliv­ery of containers.

Fur­ther devel­op­ment steps are still required on both sides before final live oper­a­tion with large robot fleets is pos­si­ble. How­ever, today VEGA Grieshaber KG is already one of the tech­no­log­i­cal pio­neers in the automa­tion of mate­r­ial supply.