Automated guided vehicle

I was having a talk with a couple of guys in one of the Best Plants Award winners this year, and they said that they went to the Automate show exploring the idea of human robots and how immature those robots were.

But they came back realizing what they needed was actually AGVs.

and other robots that help move things safely around the plant.

Is that what you're seeing COOs taking a look at right now when it comes to AI and that sort of thing?

So to automate that, this brownfield is very, very, very hard.

So they've done part of it with AGVs and AMRs.

That's relatively accepted.

So that works well.

They they acquired Kiva system quite some time ago.

In Kiva system, they make the little AMRs or AGVs taking the whole Amazon shelf to a station so someone can just pick right from that kind of shelf.

And it's deployed, I would say, everywhere.

So it's quite impressive.

We more than doubled it, but, uh, it would just be a, a, same thing you saw today, but at a, double the scale, right? So we've got a lot of pallet positions to fill, and that's what you'd see five years from now.

Um, we, we talked, you and I talked about it a little bit, uh, like the, the five-year mark, about the, the AGVs, the, the, the, uh, pallet movers and things of that nature-

Yep

... just not even being really thought of five years ago.

They have some automation in those ports.

They have, in the case of Long Beach, they have These vehicles called AGVs, they are these platforms that are moving freight between two stacks.

The Long Beach Container Terminal, it's a very impressive place to go visit.

Yeah, I remember reading a book, and it was talking about buying a charger online and through Amazon, and it goes through the Port of L.A. And the guy who wrote it was from Wall Street Journal.

And you can't necessarily do that.

But there's a lot going on in the market right now, right? And especially when it comes to humanoid or when it comes to AMRs, so maybe AGVs, so AMRs with arms, etc.

And maybe I can comment on that because I have two questions.

Two event recommendations exactly on this topic.

There goes from being one pick area where a guy would get a list of orders and go out and pick them to there are 17 different pick areas, and depending on the SKU, the velocity, the requirements, all of the inventory and all of the orders could potentially be batched out across all of them to combine onto a single truck at the end of the day.

So wh- why the theory of constraints is important is that as you add more complexity, which is more flows inside of a warehouse, the decision-making has to change so that your objective is to maximize the overall flow of that inventory and the service of what we're actually delivering on time in full, and the bottleneck n- might change by the minute, right? So if you have, uh, automation that gets dropped in, so we'll use automated guided vehicles, AGVs, that are just moving pallets back and forth in a simple, um, CPG warehouse, for example.

The introduction of those AGVs means that they do things at a certain rate, and you can only ever operate that process at that rate.

So the handoffs to and from the AGVs have to be managed perfectly.

Beyond that, can it take the actual board that you're going to be... running down that line and do

a simulation of that? Oh, it goes right down to the product, the human beings surrounding the lines, the AGVs, the material arriving at the loading dock.

We have simulations running in our booth right now that literally show the tractor trailers backing up to the loading docks and bringing materials in.

You don't have to go to that level of granularity, but you can.