Earlier this month, Automated Warehouse visited a distribution center in New Hampshire. Nearly half of the more than 1 million-sq.-ft. space has installed automation from Symbotic Inc. over the past three years, with the rest to deploy its systems over the coming year.
“This site serves over 100 retail centers across New England,” Brendan Blennerhassett, chief product innovation officer at Symbotic, told Automated Warehouse. “We have employees stationed here, including an engineer for the night shift.”
“Most warehouses are still very manual,” he added. “The problem is that operators aren’t getting the full utilization of storage density or throughput.”
Cases of a single SKU on a pallet may start out dense, but as they are picked down for mixed-case distribution to stores, 40% to 50% of racks could be empty, said Blennerhassett.
Founded in 2007 as CasePick Systems, Symbotic provides robotics, software, and machine learning for high-density storage and material handling. The Wilmington, Mass.-based company said it modernizes warehouses for some of the world’s largest retail, wholesale, and food and beverage companies.
Retailer adds automation to save space, increase efficiency
In addition to reliance on manual operations, other challenges facing warehouses include the need for wide aisles for forklifts; the desire for granular visibility into inventory; and ergonomic strain on associates involved in truck unloading, depalletizing, and palletizing.
Aisles take up another 20% of space, Blennerhassett pointed out. “Our system breaks down all pallets to cases right away,” he said. “Other companies’ automated storage and retrieval systems [ASRS] put cases on trays, but we use vision to recognize each case for maximized storage.”
At the New Hampshire distribution center, we saw people still engaged in repetitive processes. By contrast, Symbotic’s “end-to-end” system used industrial robot arms for depalletizing and singulation, with its own custom end-of-arm tooling to lift boxes from the bottom to avoid damage.
During a short conveyor trip, each case is dimensioned, labeled, and routed to a storage location by autonomous vehicles called SymBots. They can move up to 25 mph (32.1 kph) in the system. The SymBots currently follow magnetic strips, but Symbotic plans to replace them with more autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) because lidar and vision technology has become cheaper.
“Our system allows us access to any case at any time, and acts like a giant pallet,” observed Matt Buckley, vice president of communications at Symbotic. “We don’t require greenfields to install our system.”
Symbotic retains control over its tech
Symbotic said its system is fully integrated and proprietary, including the AI that enables it to track each case and build “store-friendly” outbound pallets with up to 150 cases each.
“Our system does all the receiving,” explained Blennerhassett. “It detects damage, since 20% of freight is not palletized but floor-loaded into trucks. Most cases fit into our 10-level modular structure, which has multiple shelves within each 36 in. [91.4 cm] level.”
After the so-called freeway, cases take a specialized lift and are brought along over 200 “avenues” in Symbotic’s storage system. This location used a total of 900 SymBots, which travel an average of 50 mi. (80.4 km) per day.
The most traveled SymBot has logged more than 52,000 miles (83,685.8 km), and the systems are maintained based on mileage.
The SymBots currently use induction charging and capacitors as they pause to pick up boxes, but they will soon use batteries from Nyobolt. This allows for faster charging and a longer usage duration than the current ultracapacitor solution, said Blennerhassett.
Looking ahead to a future with even more automation
From the time the New Hampshire warehouse receives an order to a particular case being palletized can be as quick as seven minutes, said Blennerhassett.
“Our system follows each individual store’s planogram,” he said. “We’re handling 9 million cases a day across our network, and we expect to more than double that by the end of the year.”
Symbotic has rolled out technology for breakpack and expects increasing demand for micro-fulfillment centers and grocery. In addition, it has entered the pharmaceutical sector with Medline.
In February, Symbotic acquired autonomous forklift maker Fox Robotics. Blennerhassett acknowledged that the company is also looking into systems for truck and trailer unloading.