Forklifts are a common fixture on many work sites, and are essential to daily logistics operations and moving goods through the supply chain. However, forklifts are also a common cause of workplace accidents, with an estimated 90,000 forklift-related safety incidents each year.
You’ve planned what your team should do if there’s a fire or other emergency in your warehouse. But have you planned what your robots should do? It’s a surprisingly complicated question. With complex AI and highly autonomous systems, the answer to emergency safety may not be as simple as “turning them off.”
Designing mobile robot safety systems is a huge undertaking. From onboard sensors to safety PLCs, you need to make sure your future customers are safe at all times. But, what happens when a safety system fails? How will your machine respond? Just one failure could lead to disastrous consequences that will impact your company’s brand and your personal conscience. That’s why functional safety is key to understand and implement in your robot design.
In the not-so-distant past, people were the only laborers in a warehouse. Their jobs included everything from material transport and palletizing to performing repetitive tasks like moving and lifting heavy boxes on and off of racks. Now, thanks to autonomous mobile robots (AMR), warehouse operations can run more efficiently and laborers can spend more time on value-added tasks while mitigating repetitive injury risk.
FORT’s Nathan Bivans was a recent guest on The New Warehouse Podcast, discussing warehouse automation and industry trends with Martin McVicar of Combilift and host Kevin Lawton.
As the world continues to adjust to the challenges posed by COVID-19, robots are playing an increasingly important role in getting goods to the people who need them.
