Internal logistics will never be the same again with Autonomous mobile robots.

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1 Internal logistics will never be the same again with Autonomous mobile robots. Opteq Robotics vision on micro logistics in industry and professional services Henk Kiela July/Aug Introduction We all are somehow familiar with the way goods move around in hospitals and industrial companies. A characteristic of this way of moving goods around is the fact that in most cases humans push or pull a chariot with goods. The chariot often is specially designed to carry food for patients or bins with parts for a production order. And the chariots often carry a lot of items to have some stock in production to minimize movements. Sometimes the destination is a fixed location like a manufacturing machine. But in a hospital there are many locations where the goods are delivered or served. We will study these examples in more detail in the next chapter. The basic question we will answer: "How can we organize internal logistics with autonomous robots to move goods and why would we bother about our are workers now pushing the chariots?" Our vision is that autonomous robotized logistics will change these internal logistics drastically in the coming years but we will need the personnel as well in a different though natuaral role.. Opteq Robotics develops its own mobile robots for use in industrial companies and service organizations. But as well we offer more or less standard solutions from other mobile robot suppliers. We have no preference toward our own robot technology or that of our supplier. From experience and the various possibilities we know how to advice the best solution for any customer. A mobile robot is in most cases just a partial logistic solution. Handling of parts, maybe combined with binpicking, operator interaction, docking station integration and integration of fleet management with the production planning process and software will be essential as well for a customer to deploy mobile robot logistics. As far as we cannot offer this, our suppliers and network partners will their bit in harmony with the requirements of the customers. This article will elaborate our vision on future internal logistics how we as a company want to be the partner for industrial manufacturing companies and professional service organizations introducing autonomous robots logistics in their operations 1

2 2 Character and organization of internal logistics Internal logistics in many (SME) manufacturing companies, hospitals, elderly homes and logistics centers have one thing in common when observing movement of goods in their organization: 2.1 Industrial logistics in SME's In most larger companies with larger scale production and less variation in products fixed mechanization often has been realized with belt- and conveyer systems. In many smaller companies the product mix is greater and production volumes per order generally lower. Goods in this kind of industry are often moved by people, in many cases the machine operator who prepares the machine and workplace for a new workorder. These companies need flexibility to move from one production order to another. Investing in mechanized transport systems like belts and industrial automation often is not economic, so goods are moved by the operators, forklift operators or logistic employees. Lets take the example of a metal part that has to be molded into a plastic part in an injection molding machine. To start a production order, raw materials, parts and probable tooling needs to move from stock locations to the machine that will produce the parts. The operator in this mid size company will collect the parts and tools at the central store on the end of the shop floor. The tooling has to be mounted into the machine by the operator. The machine settings must be loaded and tested and some test parts will be produced to validate everything by the operator. Then production can start. Every 20 seconds a metal part has to be taken from a bin, put into the machine, a button has to be pressed and 20 seconds later the completed part can be taken out of the machine and thrown in another bin. After two hours the bin with bare metal parts is empty and the receiving bin's are fulle. The machine is halted for 15 minutes to swap bins in the central store. Two business cases can be observed here to increase operator productivity and enrich the work of the operator: 1 Mobile robots could take care of brining new parts to the workstation and take completed parts at more frequent intervals than two hours. Relieving the operator from routine work and increasing machine run-time. Another benefit would be the possibility to check quality of finished products every 30 minutes rather than once every two hours. This helps to improve quality assurance. 2 The operators action to take a metal part from the bin, put it in the machine and take that part after 20 seconds to put it into another bin could be automated easily with today technology with various robot arms that can configured once by the operator and are capable of bin picking parts and putting the in a machine themselves.. What would this mean to the operator? Would he lose his job? Or does hids role merely changes to a supervisor taking care of setting up the process on a machine and over viewing the automated supply of parts and the automated process of handling parts around the machine. Although today technology offers a lot more than a few years ago, operator attention to 'fix things' 2

3 every now and then will be required. But the operator anyhow would get time by use of the robots to setup another molding machine for another production order. The operator would do most of the time what he is good at, setting up equipment and its processes. In practice most products are produced in more than one production steps. This means that parts have to be moved to another production location instead of stock, in which case production is organized as show below. Mobile robots transporting goods offer another benefit here over classic production. Due to the fact that smaller quantities can be moved from one station to another, overall lead times are reduced as well. This improves delivery time performance to the customer. 2.2 Mobile robots in service organizations like hospitals A hospital faces different challenges compared to industry. Food distribution for example must be delivered within a certain time slot to regard freshness, temperature of the food and individual wishes and menu choices. Mobile robotics can help to improve the speed and quality of the distribution of food because portions can be split over smaller robotized carts. The distribution system on the cart can be filled in the kitchen on an individual basis per patient/client. Because food distribution goes quicker, the time that food carts are moving on the floor is reduced. 3

4 For linen distribution and medicine distribution similar benefits can be seen. Client and bed location scheduled goods movement will be easy to implement with mobile robots leaving less room for errors in medicine distribution and less carts on the floor for linen distribution. In the coming period more research will be done with hospitals to investigate in more detail how internal logistics, service to clients and quality of work for personnel would benifit from the deployment of mobile robots. 4

5 3 The economic benefits of using more robots for micro logistics In Western Europe we generally recognize the fact that we need to improve our productivity to keep up in a worldwide competitive market. We have to do more work with the same people. Cost of services and goods have to go down. At the same time it becomes harder to attract sufficient skilled people. We estimate that in Europe 10-20% of precious labor time is spent on logistics movements. Bringing goods, tools, food, etc. from one place to the other to be able to execute the work the work the professional worker ought to be doing. Suppose autonomous robots can take over half of the amount of logistic tasks currently done by workers that would result in a productivity increase of 5-10%. Of course it could be argued that walking around with a chariot also provides some freedom and an opportunity for social interaction with colleagues. Our belief however is that a relief of logistic tasks by robots does provides more freedom and more time for self chosen interaction with colleagues for workers. In any case all these logistic movements currently have a few unwanted side effects: - For efficiency reasons chariots carry more parts than needed to minimize logistic movements. As a result chariots are larger and heavier than needed resulting in more effort and strain for workers while moving them. - It is difficult to provide for example food service at the same time to more than one location because many maels are in the same chariot.. - If goods are brought to one location, for example to a plastic injection machine, more floor space is needed to store all the goods temporarily. This cost floor space and makes it harder for people to move around in the production environment. - The strain for the people who do the moving is a potential health risk for the worker and a safety risk in case the chariot hits or squeezes someone while passing. The figure below provides some cases for the way logistics are currently organized.. 4 State of the art autonomous mobile robots for logistics. A lot is happening right now in the field of robotics in general and in autonomous mobile robots specifically. The same technology that literally enables electric cars and autonomous driving functions in cars also pushes autonomous mobile robot technology. One might wonder what recently has changed that makes Mobile robot applications suddenly feasible? There are at least three reasons: - Most of the theory that enables autonomous mobility and mobile robots exists already for decades. But only recently sufficient embedded calculation power became available at a reasonable price. - Sensortechnology has boosted in the past five years. For example intelligent vision systems with embedded processing capable of scanning the environment of mobile robots to navigate and avoid obstacles start becoming available now since some three years. And many more and better products are coming soon stimulated by the automotive developments in autonomous driving. - Mobile power, battery technology, has improved dramatically the last three years. Again electric cars have pushed technology and with is, prices down and performance per kg and per dm^3 up. 5

6 It took manufacturers of systems for intelligent mobile robots a few years to deploy the theory and embedded processing power into new products. But their products are now entering the market. Examples are Neobotix from Germany, Robotnik from Spain, etc. Some companies supply complete mobile robots, other only supply key module like BlueBotics in Switzerland. They provide a complete navigation solution that integrates very well in shop floor planning systems. Their 'Blue Box' can be used by robot manufacturers who build custom mobile indoor robots. Another positive factor for the recent developments has been the release of the new safety standards for Service Robots (ISO 13482) Although this standard is intended for a rather new category of service robots, the standard may be used as well in other domains like industry and care as long as specific standards for service robots in these area's are not published. This standard provides guidelines to develop and certify safe autonomous robots and limits the manufacturers liability worldwide. 5 Position of Opteq Robotics in the market place Opteq wants to be a logistic solution provider for industry and professional service organisations like for example hospitals, elderly care, etc. With all the products and services entering these markets, the first question to be answered is the business case for a mobile robot in industry and care. An autonomous mobile robot from any manufacturer is not a solution for anyone in these market. At least two additional important elements are needed to make a useful case in either industry or services: - Integration of mobile robots at its destinations and picking location. - Integration or the fleet of mobile robots to a planning system. 5.1 integration of robot and docking station The first point is about what the robot needs to take with it from A to B and how to get the parts on board and drop them off at the destination. It seems very unlikely or even undesirable that a human is present at both locations to put parts on the robot and take these parts off at the destination. So the robot system needs to have an automatic on/off loading mechanism that hooks on to the docking stations at locations for pickup and delivery. Example: Parts are produced at location A and put in a standardized bin. If the bin is full it is moved automatically or by an operator to the pickup location for the robot. The robot automatically transfers the bin from the pickup location on board, moves to the destination and automatically transfers the bin to the offloading station. 6

7 Some examples of standard robots are seen here (Knapp left, Neobotix right). These robots generally are capable of carrying up to 50 or 100 kg payload. This kind of solutions requires small adaptations at the docking stations and uses common bins. For those application where this method does not work, Opteq Robotics can provide custom solutions to customers and take care of the integration of those custom solutions on the mobile robots and at the docking stations. 5.2 Integration with shop floor planning To deploy a fleet of autonomous logistic robots there has to be an automated system that generates drive orders (missions) for the robots in the fleet. In a manufacturing environment these missions are best generated in the MES system (Manufacturing Execution System). This system triggers execution of processes at individual machines, workstations and operators. This system has all the information about wich parts are ready for transport o a next location and which locations do need supply of materials, semi finished parts and tools. On the basis of this information missions for the robot fleet can be generated. It might be that transport of parts and tools or the docking station requires a particualar (type of) robot to perform the task. The fleet of robots thus may exist of different types of robot more or less suited for a task. Some examples of different robots in a fleet: Different payloads (light/heavy) Different product size (Small/larges) Special docking station adaptations or product holders Adapted for different environments (indoor smooth floor/outdoor paved area) These requirements have to be matched by the fleet management system to be sure that the right kind of robot appears in time at the docking station. With the great variety of manufacturing companies and their requirements for robots and the MES systems these companies use, the connection to the fleet management system will have to by defined and built. 7

8 Opteq Robotics acts in a network of suppliers and robot partners. Opteq takes care of the complete process to realize such a connection by using subcontractors. To assure to customer organizations that expectations are realistic for both parties, Opteq has developed a standard method to investigate requirements, define the specifications and realize the deployment plan including the required interfaces between production planning systems and fleet management systems. 8

9 6 Process of integrating Mobile robots into manufacturing and service environments. If our aim is to help companies to embrace - and work with mobile robots in their organization a careful analysis of the requirements and possibilities in a company or service organization is needed. We have developed a standard method to benchmark the individual organizations to come to useful business cases, a possible introduction process and relevant integration aspects in the organization and operation. For example most companies will operate their mobile robot fleet in connection to their internal planning software to automatically plan and schedule tasks for various classes of mobile robot. How to organize this, how to do the integration with their production planning process and software si a requirement to be able to propose the complete picture in time and cost in various stages. t is unlikely that a company roll outs a full plan for the use of mobile robots. They rather prefer to start with small experiment to see the benifits and validate the interaction between robot mobile logistics and the rest of their operation and personnel. Safety is a generic point of attention that will be an integral part of the requirements analysis. The proposal will reflect the way safety has to be realized and to what levels intended and unintended users of the mobile robots will be protected and by what measures. In most cases there as to be a fleet supervisor that keeps track of orders and deviations. He has to ultimately decide on speed orders and take action in case of calamities. 6.1 Requirements analysis Checklist We use a list to investigate the current situation at customers, their expectations and their production environment to be able to analyze their curent situation and the possibilities for using mobile robots and robot handling. We require quit some detail information from a customer. The checklist thereforenis shared in advance with the customer. All information exchanged is confidential informtionto us. Investigation of service criteria (KPI) and integral cost of logistics The informationcollected should be sufficient Report 6.2 Proposal of possible business cases Match between portfolio of Opteq and partners and KPI's Introduction plan including integration aspects of mobile robots and handling robots in the organisation - Integration with docking locations - Integration with (production) planning systems -Training of robot supervisors and personnel 9

10 - Safety and techical and/or training aspects. 10