Last week, GreyOrange Inc. announced an expansion of its Intralogistics and Case Pick Ranger portfolio. It said the new autonomous forklifts can handle closed pallets and to manage multiple pallets or trolleys concurrently.
The Atlanta-based company also claimed that they can improve operational efficiency and throughput in response to growing demand for automation. The Ranger Forklift XXL for case picking and Ranger Forklift AnyPallet for close pallet handling offer go-live turnarounds within a few weeks, said GreyOrange.
These processes have been common pain points for customers, said Akash Gupta, co-founder and CEO of GreyOrange.
“Case picking has been one of the most painful processes for some warehouses where it’s very hard to access things,” he told Automated Warehouse. “So I think that’s a very inefficient process that we were looking at to automate.”
“Now, with the right capabilities in GrayMatter, our software, and these robots, we could find a perfect solution that can help these warehouses to be a lot more efficient,” Gupta said.
The newly patented Ranger Forklift bots are supported by GreyMatter’s pick-assist and intralogistics service. The company said the new autonomous forklifts are key intellectual properties and are being commissioned by strategic customers.
Costs are key to GreyOrange validation process
When GreyOrange starts working on a new product, the company first considers how it can bring costs down for its customers, Gupta said. This means looking at its existing software and hardware and determining how it can use those capabilities to make a more efficient warehouse.
“It always starts with, ‘How do we help customers to make things a lot more efficient and coordinated?’” he said.
Gupta said GreyOrange has a three-step certification process. The first is creating the robot and ensuring it can digitally connect.
The next step involves a thorough design review and a range of testing. This includes testing for reliability, resistance, the availability of spare parts, and much more, Gupta said.
Finally, GreyOrange’s team tests for safety and ensures that its robots are compliant with relevant standards.
The company’s latest products are robust enough that they can be easily and quickly implemented in the warehouse, claimed Gupta.
“You don’t need to change your infrastructure,” he said. “You don’t need to change a lot of things in the warehouse, and these are the same warehouses where [other] forklifts and people are working.”
Orchestration necessary for Ranger success
GreyOrange said that market demand has increasingly focused on automated systems that can efficiently manage multiple pallets or trolleys concurrently.
“A lot of times when I’ve visited some of these warehouses, I’m amazed by the number of forklifts that are running,” Gupta said. “A lot of this becomes very inefficient because, unlike a set of robots that can be centrally orchestration, these forklifts are being individually operated.”
Gupta said that these warehouses not only have higher chances of safety incidents, but they’re also always struggling to find the workers to drive the forklifts. Operators need special licenses to operate them, and there is a shortage of qualified workers.
This is why GreyOrange felt it was important to create GreyMatter, an orchestration system that can handle more than 100 autonomous forklifts at once.
“At the end of the day, the core goal of an orchestrator is to ensure that a group of [tasks] that have been provided gets done in time and with the least possible resources,” said Gupta. “Let’s say there are 1,000 cases to be picked and 500 pallets to be moved between different locations of the warehouse.”
“Then, basically, the system breaks all of that down into different sets of tasks,” he added. “It then finds the right sequence, the right type of bots, and the right timing of doing all of these tasks so that it becomes the most efficient.”
Moving forward, Gupta said he believes orchestration will continue to be an important topic in automation.
“While physical automation is important, until the decision-making layer also gets automated, getting the value of physical automation is going to be very, very incremental,” he noted.
GreyOrange is looking at automating inbound, outbound, loading, and unloading activities in warehouses. It said it also plans to make its existing systems more dense and efficient.
“We’ll continue to add different robotic technologies as part of our Certified Ranger Network so that our customers and retailers can depend on us to do the hard work of choosing the right set of technologies and building applications while they can focus on accelerating their automation journeys,” Gupta said.