Autonomous Load Carrier Handling

In recent years, labor shortages have become a growing concern from warehousing to manufacturing industries. These lead to delays in order fulfillment, increased operating costs, and reduced customer satisfaction. It is extremely hard to find, hire and keep warehouse employees and especially forklift drivers; in fact, there are more than 440,000 unfilled jobs worldwide in 2023. Forklift accidents are another major concern, where 25% of all warehouse accidents occur at the loading dock. Worldwide 100,000 injuries related to forklift trucks happen in a year.

Additionally, current automated guided vehicles (AGV) and autonomous mobile robots (AMR) face challenges to handle dynamic systems such as changes in the position of load carriers at runtime or shifted of the load carriers due to unexpected reasons. Handling of current systems is expensive due to usage of numerous sensors, and current AGV and AMR fail in case of narrow routes or “never seen before” circumstances.

We are here to help you to tackle these problems!

Siemens offers an AI-based software system, Autonomous Load Carrier Handling, to ease these pains! But what is Autonomous Load Carrier Handling?

Autonomous Load Carrier Handling consisting of an engineering tool for non-AI experts and an intelligent control system as an add-on to the onboard navigation system. Hereby, Autonomous Load Carrier Handling enables AGV and AMR to approach and handle various load carriers in known as well as unknown environments. It is a flexible, easily integrable, and adaptable solution, which increases the safety in a shopfloor or at a loading dock in a warehouse, and therefore helps the pain of labor shortages and decrease the risk of forklift accidents by having less manual involvement. While Autonomous Load Carrier Handling simplifies use cases such as rear truck unloading at a dock bay or navigating to load carriers in known and unknown areas of the map; its design allows to extend to many other scenarios.

Our upcoming technology towards the future of material handling

With Autonomous Load Carrier Handling, Siemens enables AGV and AMR manufacturers to enhance their vehicles by boosting their ability: visual detection of load carriers and navigation towards them in known and unknown environment! It is a flexible, robust, and easily integrable load carrier handling solution for AGV and AMR which reduces costs, engineering efforts, and time with improved flexibility and safety. Its engineering tool simplifies the new adaption processes of AI models to a new vehicle or a new type of load carrier for non-AI experts.