It breaks through the stacking of material frames above 6 layers, 9.4 meters of high-level access, and 2.0 narrow channel access, and realizes the simultaneous dispatch of more than 40 unmanned forklift robots in a single workshop single system.
Wen | Luo Yingying
According to the data of China Mobile Robot (AGV/AMR) Industry Alliance and the statistics of the New Strategic Mobile Robot Industry Research Institute, the sales volume of China's fork mobile robots (including visual navigation) will reach 8,000 units in 2021, an increase of 60% year-on-year, and the market size will be about 2.45 billion yuan, an increase of 42.40% year-on-year.
Chart: Sales volume (number of units) and growth rate of China's forked mobile robot market from 2015 to 2021
As one of the representative enterprises of unmanned forklift trucks, in 2021, the total amount of robot completion order contracts will increase by 300%, the average amount of a single contract will increase by 150%, the customer repeat procurement rate will reach more than 40%, and the landing project will cover a large area of the "deep water area" scene of manufacturing industry, warehousing and logistics, machinery manufacturing and other subdivisions.
The product + solution is a two-pronged approach to open up the whole scene of the deep water area
Deng Xiaoping, the source of the "deep water area", once said: "China's reform is to cross the river by feeling the stones. At the beginning, in the river, the water was relatively shallow, and the stones were easier to touch, but now that they are in the deep water area, the stones are not easy to touch. Li Luyang, CEO of future robots, borrowed "deep water area" to refer to the complex and changeable scene environment faced by unmanned forklifts.
Compared with the relatively simple shallow water area scenarios such as simple process, cargo standards, low-level access, and plane handling, in the "deep water area" scenario, unmanned forklifts need to deal with factors such as mixed yards of people and vehicles, random placement of goods, non-standard vehicles, and diversification of truck types, which tests the peak efficiency, operational accuracy and adaptability of complex scenes of unmanned forklifts. The "deep water area" scenario is also the customer's pain point difficulty, around this kind of pain point problem, the future robot from the product and solution two aspects of the breakthrough, and accumulated a lot of project experience.
Products: E&O series directly hit the pain points of the industry
In 2021, in view of the pain points of industry scenarios, future robots have launched E series and O series successively to complete the iterative upgrading of the product matrix.
E series indoor/outdoor counterbalanced unmanned forklift: This series of products unlocks the core scene requirements of external dock loading and unloading, and realizes the indoor and outdoor full-scenario application of unmanned forklift trucks. Through the configuration of 3D laser + visual perception technology, multi-axis real-time motion planning technology and high-precision visual servo control technology, the E series indoor/outdoor counterbalanced unmanned forklift has the outdoor positioning ability to cope with light changes, three-dimensional environment perception ability, accurate and efficient visual servo control ability, and the peak efficiency in complex and changeable environments can be compared with the peak efficiency of manual operation.
O series omnidirectional unmanned forklift: This series of products is aimed at handling in large volumes, changeable processes and complex scenarios. The "O" series omnidirectional unmanned forklift can achieve 360 ° center rotation, zero right angle turning inner radius, all-round arbitrary movement, with the narrow body design of the body, to achieve the narrow channel of cargo access, large volume (ultra-long / ultra-wide) material flexible operation, etc., effectively improve the space utilization rate and storage capacity.
Up to now, the future robot has released nine series of unmanned forklifts, covering a large area of deep-water scene needs in different industries.
Scheme: Cover the scene of the deep water area just needed
Product iterative upgrade, the program layer is also difficult to overcome, the warehouse platform as a cargo in and out of the just need scene, whether it is the external materials unloaded from the truck into the warehouse, or the transportation of materials in the warehouse loaded into the truck, the two seemingly simple processes have low operational efficiency, low safety, high cargo damage rate and other issues, in this regard, the future robot as early as 2020 to achieve unmanned loading and unloading solutions, in 2021 again breakthrough upgrade.
The outer platform flying wing vehicle is unmanned loading and unloading
The solution was officially released for the first time at the CeMAT ASIA 2021 exhibition last year, with VNE20 and VNP15 two unmanned forklifts, dual vehicles and dual processes to restore the interpretation of the unmanned loading and unloading scene of the outer platform flying wing. The visual navigation system and perception positioning independently developed by the robot in the future make the unmanned forklift have strong anti-interference, resist outdoor strong light interference, and the high accuracy is enough to rival the beauty of the work industry, intelligently identify people/warehouse locations/goods, etc., achieve global positioning and local precision positioning, improve the efficiency of unmanned forklift operations, and configure a central control scheduling system to match logistics and information flow, monitor the operating status of unmanned forklifts in real time, and complete the real-time scheduling of multiple forklifts.
The outer platform van is unmanned
Following the flying wing vehicle, the future robot will continue to overcome the unmanned loading and unloading scenario of the van with a difficulty level of almost leapfrog, and at the same time, based on the scenario and landing the first unmanned loading and unloading project case of the van in China in the petrochemical industry.
The VNE20 unmanned forklift equipped with the project is based on the unmanned framework of the future robot, and adopts a visual plus laser positioning scheme to cope with the outdoor positioning of light changes. After the unmanned forklift truck loads into the narrow and long carriage, through the perception of laser and visual positioning, in the 2.35m width of the carriage, the left and right clearance of the goods is less than 30mm, the accurate placement of two trains of goods 18 tors, the positioning accuracy reaches almost comparable to manual operations.
In addition, equipped with the central control scheduling system independently developed by the future robot, it is connected with the customer's WMS system through the local area network to realize the unmanned forklift task scheduling and vehicle scheduling functions. When the driver parks the truck, the boarding bridge is set up, and the warehouse task is issued under the vertical warehouse system, and the vertical warehouse system transports the target loading goods to the warehouse outlet, and after the goods reach the end of the conveyor line, the conveyor line PLC sends the loading demand signal to the unmanned forklift central control system, and dispatches the unmanned forklift forklift to pick up the goods for loading.
In addition to issuing tasks at the terminal, the entire loading process does not require excessive manual interference, improves the safety of the loading process, reduces the damage to the goods caused by manual handling, reduces the waiting time of trucks, and improves the overall operation efficiency.
The solution brings customers a significant increase in factory loading and unloading efficiency, shortens the waiting time for trucks, and increases the utilization rate of the fleet, saving transportation costs; at the same time, it increases the loading and unloading volume of each month, accelerates the speed of goods entering and leaving the warehouse, reduces the area of the cache area, reduces the cost of our warehouse, and automates the whole process from the inside of the warehouse to the loading of goods out of the warehouse.
In addition, the future robot has also broken through the domestic 6-layer or more material frame stacking, 9.4 meters high-level access, 2.0 narrow channel access and other first cases, to create a flexible solution, to achieve coverage of external dock loading, cage stacking, cargo loading and unloading, outdoor long-distance transportation and other core just-needed scenarios.
The first 6-layer material frame precision stacking solution: with the future robot unmanned forklift as the operating machine, developed for a variety of specifications, different load frame stacking, the overall stacking height can reach about 5.3m, which is the future robot for factory logistics and warehousing logistics, directly hit the unmanned high-level stacking pain points of a major action and breakthrough.
9.4 meters high shelf dense storage: the use of R series forward-moving unmanned forklifts, breaking through the 9 meters high access application. The existence of high-level storage of the blind area of vision, unmanned forklift using laser end sensing Laser Scanning, accurate detection of the release space, the accuracy of the placement of goods is controlled at ±20mm, to ensure the safety and accuracy of goods in the high-level access.
Narrow channel high-frequency dense storage: the use of SLIM series pallet stacking height unmanned forklift, narrow body design, the minimum right angle turning channel width is only 1800mm, a variety of hybrid sensors make the unmanned forklift has a strong perception performance, can adaptively detect the release space, cargo posture and so on.
With the continuous deepening of application scenarios and the continuous expansion of application fields, can unmanned forklift solutions achieve standardized replication in the future? Xie Li, general manager of the sales of the future robot, said in an interview with the new strategic mobile robot full media that the current industrial logistics scenario is more complex, the industry field differentiation is obvious, even in the same industry, different manufacturing scenarios, production processes, links and rhythms are not the same, at present, in the manufacturing scene, the future robot in the general shallow water area scene has achieved partial standardization replication, but in the deep water area scene also needs a large amount of data precipitation support, can not be completely copied, can only be copied as much as possible, This is also the current situation of the unmanned forklift industry.
Xie Li said, "What the current future robots are doing is to use our technology to solve the existing problems of customers. ”
Soft and hard power builds the cornerstone of the "future" long-distance running
With the advent of the robot era, in 2021, the market business and scale of future robots will grow rapidly, with a total of 350+ projects, 100% project delivery, and a customer repurchase rate of more than 40%. The "future" in the field of unmanned forklifts will be to be met by the challenges and planning, Xie Li believes, mainly around the "soft and hard power" of the enterprise.
Soft power: expand the team + increase production capacity
Established a hefei factory in China, and copied the scene 1:1. In 2021, the robot will build a production commissioning base in Hefei, Anhui Province, which will be used to increase the production capacity of the production line on the one hand and cope with the growing demand for projects. On the other hand, the base has reconstructed and built a variety of complex scenarios of industrial logistics such as cage stacking, high-level access, and narrow-channel access, so as to achieve breakthroughs and applications of innovative technologies.
Xie Li introduced, "Facing the deep-water area scene, we hope to first achieve 1:1 replication of the scene in our factory, achieve the effect that customers want before the official landing, and confirm that the shipment delivery can be realized, and at the same time, the time for project delivery can be shortened." ”
Channel empowerment area. At present, in the future, robots will actively open up upstream and downstream cooperative suppliers in the industry, increase the route of empowering the region with channels in terms of sales model, and dig deep into local regional information to gradually cover the national channels.
Vigorously cultivate talent teams. The future robot is in a period of rapid development, and last year, the future robot delivery team expanded to more than 100 people. According to Xie Li, the company now conducts half-year training for this group of delivery personnel, during which it takes two to three projects to ensure the proficiency of the delivery personnel and ensure the delivery efficiency of the project.
Hard power: Technical scenarios continue to be overcome
Visual navigation technology. As one of the earliest enterprises in China to apply visual navigation technology to unmanned forklifts, the "Bright Eye" environmental detection system independently developed by the future robot is based on deep learning image recognition technology to achieve real-time detection of information such as warehouse location, cargo position and storage space at the global and local ends. With the help of big data and AI intelligent algorithms, the system can effectively identify and track objects such as goods, pallets, forklifts and operators in the warehouse, and share the object information to the user's warehouse management system in real time, providing enterprises with warehouse safety information while coordinating with unmanned operations of intelligent equipment such as AGVs and inspection robots.
Conquer just-needed scenarios. Xie Li mentioned that how to further enhance the high flexibility and high precision of unmanned forklifts and the high efficiency of operation is the direction that future robots have been pursuing since its inception, and the future will continue to overcome complex scenarios that are just needed towards this goal, truly solve the pain point needs of customers, and achieve cost reduction and efficiency. At the same time, as far as possible to create a standardized scenario, to achieve large-scale replication of the project, to provide solutions for the entire industry.