Advancing Manufacturing Productivity and Safety with AutoGuide Mobile Robots
Do you know that forklifts cause around 85 fatal accidents a year, 34,900 accidents result in serious injury and 61,800 are classified as non-serious?
Improving Safety
The safety concerns around workers using forklifts are huge.
In 2017, the National Safety Council (NSC) estimated that a worker was injured on the job every seven seconds. This means that over 104 million production days were lost due to injury. Eye-opening statistics like these have led many manufacturers to focus more on rigorous safety protocols. According to the National Safety Council, the total cost of work injuries in 2017 was $161.5 billion.
These numbers could be massively driven down through commissioning AMRs into your workplace. Robotic innovation gives companies ways to achieve ideal productivity levels but have an environment where workers remain safe.
The most common workplace injuries include:
Repetitive tasks – the tediousness of the tasks can lead to distraction and fatigue resulting in serious injuries if fingers, hands or arms slip into the machine.
Interaction with large scale equipment that use force at high speed- production equipment, forklifts and other industrial machinery lack vision and sensing equipment to stop motion when a person’s body gets in the way
Lifting and transferring heavy items - Low-value transportation and palletising tasks often involve over-reaching and carrying items that are large, heavy and awkward, resulting in falls, trips or muscle strain.
Challenges Faced
Many industries are facing challenges such as labour sourcing, increased operating costs, a need to improve safety and productivity, new emerging technology choices, and fast changing demands. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has added to these challenges with social distancing making it difficult for two or more people to work closely together. Applied Integration’s solution: To combine proven rigorous systems and engineering expertise with carefully selected world class technologies.
This approach ensures our clients will receive exceptional service from start to end, minimal adoption disruption, increased throughput, improved safety and future- proofed systems.
Advanced automation, specifically the deployment of AMRs, works alongside people to reduce injuries and frees the worker up to focus on critical productivity tasks.
The solution Applied Integration, a leading UK automation technology Integrator, has partnered with AutoGuide Mobile Robots, which has developed a range of high-payload, industrial autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).
AutoGuide’s AMRs offer solutions and benefits to an organisation, whether that be safety or increased productivity, its vital to know the positive impacts it could bring to your company.
AutoGuide Features
Autoguide’s AMRs provide a modular base that can be configured as a tow tractor or pallet stacker and can manage payloads of up to 6.8 tons. The AMRs are guided by laser, radar and environment mapping technologies, meaning navigation without the need to maintain navigational aids such as tapes, RFID tags and reflectors enabling the AMR to quickly change routes and duties to match the changing needs of the organisation.
More than 70% of order fulfilment operations and warehouses that deploy AMRs report double-digit improvement in key performance indicators such as cycle time, productivity and inventory efficiency. — IDC Research
General AMR benefits:
Dynamic real time routing optimisation
60% + reduction in walking/driving time
Collaborative execution for all transportations
Repeatable 24/7 operation
Reduced errors (with add on technology)
Intelligent multiple-simultaneous ask execution based on capacity and pick/place locations
Manage new “normals” (social distancing)
Provide process analytics/reporting
Operatives focused on value-add tasks
Simplifying your Process
The collaboration between Applied Integration and AutoGuide simplifies and streamlines the deployment of autonomous solutions in warehouse and manufacturing operations to ensure improved efficiency and safety, with a fast ROI.
Applied Integration is the only company in the UK to offer a full integrated solution with AutoGuide’s AMRs. Contact our team today to get started on enhancing your productivity and safety.
Applied Integration is a leading systems integrator, specialising in delivering the latest industry technologies with a focus on Industry 4.0, Digitalisation, Internet of Things (IoT), Analytics, Big data / Cloud Technologies, Safety Critical Systems (SIL1, SIL2, SIL3) and Robotics and Collaborative Robots (Cobots). Founded in 2005, AI has a dynamic, 50+ strong engineering team with many years combined experience.
Learn more www.appliedintegration.co.uk