STILL, the leading supplier of customized internal logistics solutions based in Hamburg with a long company history, is presenting the next evolutionary level of flexible automating at this year’s industrial trade fair in Hannover. On the stand D 30 in hall 2 – at the shared booth of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) – STILL will be presenting the prototype of an FM-X autonomous reach truck from 23 to 27 April. The truck is able to navigate autonomously through a warehouse and react flexibly to changes in its environment. Federal Minister of Economics, Phillipp Rösler took the opportunity to take a detailed look in person at the prototype during his visit to the Hannover Fair on Tuesday 24 April. Rösler was impressed by the abilities of the autonomous reach truck an appraised the work of the engineers at STILL.

This prototype truck is the intermediate result of a research supported by a technology programme hosted by the federal ministry: “Autonomics: autonomous and simulation-based systems for medium-sized companies”. The project planners STILL, CLAAS, Atos and DFKI research and develop a dynamic planning system for a new generation of autonomous vehicles for internal logistics and agriculture in the frame of a project called “marion” (mobile, autonomous, cooperative robots in complex value adding chains). Increasing the performance of isolated machines only bears limited potential to boost productivity. With the help of a planning system, autonomous machines are  enable to make a joint effort to increase productivity and to react to environmental changes considering a large number of changing conditions in order to react flexibly.

Existing automating solutions for internal flow of materials, such as AGVs require exactly defined processes and do not tolerate any changes of the environmental conditions they are embedded into. The goal of “marion” is to change exactly this aspect.

To achieve this, the project takes the following approach: A superior control system assigns varying tasks to individual vehicles. These tasks are then autonomously executed by the vehicles. The idea: it is no longer required to pre-define every individual step in the process for all the automated vehicles. The autonomous machines are able to communicate with each other, independently determine their optimum travel routes and flexibly react to changes in the environment. And even more: their ability to communicate directly enables the machines to handle tasks as a team.

This makes the research project the key to completely new work processes that automate the internal flow of materials. For many tasks existing automating solutions are not flexible enough. The future will require internal transport to approach different destinations with autonomous vehicles exactly in areas with high traffic. An example for this extraordinary challenge is to autonomously load and unload tugger trains. In this type of application the transfer points to unload the trailers frequently vary. Flexible, dynamic route planning solves this problem, because the automated vehicles can independently calculate cost-optimised routes to any destination. During the whole process, the vehicles scan their environment constantly to detect any possible changes, such as obstacles or pedestrians in the pathway. Such obstacles are considered when calculating the route.

The prototype presented by STILL at the fair is a proof of concept, showing that an automated flow of materials with such characteristics is no future dream but that it is already possible with today’s technological means. The project “marion” and the FM-X prototype from STILL are showing the future of automated processes in internal transport of materials: They show warehouse trucks that automatically coordinate their routes, sensing changes in their surroundings and flexibly adapt the workflow to act as a team.