Meyer & Meyer uses Mag­a­zino robots in shoe warehouse

The Osnabrück-based fash­ion logis­tics spe­cial­ist Meyer & Meyer is using two mod­ern pick­ing robots for car­ton han­dling in its halls for the first time. The robots are part of the company’s con­tin­u­ous inno­va­tion and automa­tion efforts. Since April 2018, the mod­ern new tech­nol­ogy has been sup­port­ing the smooth and error-free stor­age and retrieval of shoe car­tons for the cus­tomer zLa­bels at the loca­tion Peine.

The tech­nol­ogy part­ner for the project is the expe­ri­enced Munich robot­ics man­u­fac­turer Mag­a­zino. The com­pany devel­ops and builds per­cep­tion-con­trolled, mobile robots for intral­o­gis­tics. The tech­nol­ogy used enables piece-accu­rate access to indi­vid­ual objects and thus auto­mated han­dling of shoe car­tons. “Our goal is the con­tin­u­ous opti­miza­tion of all our sup­ply chain ser­vices for our cus­tomers. The use of inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­ogy is very impor­tant to us,” says Mar­cus Rei­betanz, Direc­tor Logis­tics Plan­ning & Devel­op­ment. “We are pleased that we have found a long-term part­ner in Mag­a­zino who enables us to use the lat­est robot­ics tech­nol­ogy in var­i­ous appli­ca­tion scenarios”.

The robots in detail

The pick­ing robot with the name TORU is one of the first per­cep­tion-con­trolled robots on the mar­ket that not only con­trol autonomous trans­port, but also reach into the shelves. This makes the pick­ing prin­ci­ple pick-by-robot pos­si­ble for the first time. Using numer­ous 3D cam­eras, sen­sors and laser scan­ners, the robots can per­ceive and inter­pret their sur­round­ings and thus act inde­pen­dently and make deci­sions. With its 3D cam­era, for exam­ple, TORU always first looks at the shelf in order to record the exact posi­tion and dimen­sions of a shoe box — based on this, the grip­ping process is then planned and exe­cuted in frac­tions of a sec­ond. TORU receives its work orders via a WLAN con­nec­tion to the mer­chan­dise man­age­ment sys­tem. In addi­tion, the robots can net­work, exchange expe­ri­ences with com­plex sit­u­a­tions and thus learn from each other.

Meyer & Meyer expects a vari­ety of advan­tages from the use of the robots. These include, for exam­ple, addi­tional off-hour activ­i­ties such as pre-order pick­ing overnight or inven­tory sup­port. Fur­ther advan­tages result from the high flex­i­bil­ity of the loca­tion-inde­pen­dent robots and the sup­port dur­ing ergonom­i­cally par­tic­u­larly chal­leng­ing pick­ing processes, for exam­ple pick­ing from the top or bot­tom level of a shelv­ing rack. From Sep­tem­ber 2018, Meyer & Meyer plans to use an addi­tional SOTO robot for car­tons up to 60x40x40 cm and a max­i­mum weight of 15 kg. “We con­sider robotic solu­tions to be an essen­tial com­po­nent of future-proof intral­o­gis­tics and ful­fill­ment solu­tions,” says Mar­cus Reibetanz.