Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/905872
54 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine By Jared Dunlap Jared Dunlap is a manager at West Monroe Partners and the past president of IISE's Young Professionals group. tools & techn logies In today's world, customers are demand- ing that their orders arrive faster than ever without incurring additional costs. Sounds like a supply chain's worst night- mare, right? (Particularly in December during the holiday season.) Well, Fetch Robotics has developed a solution that helps increase overall warehouse effi- ciency by reducing nonproductive time within your operations. Fetch Robotics' VirtualConveyor material transport system is one of the company's collaborative, autonomous mobile robot solutions for the ware- housing and intralogistics market. The system uses material transport robots to eliminate the time-consum- ing and often nonvalue-added activ- ity of traveling from an order selection location to a drop-off point within a warehouse. The robots are designed to take orders between two locations, thus enabling warehouse workers to stay fo- cused on the job at hand, continuously picking customer orders. The results can save anywhere from a few feet to a mile on each customer order. The robots can navigate through the warehouse using a combination of la- sers and a time-of-flight camera, which combine to allow the robots to adjust to obstructions in their path of travel. The VirtualConveyor robots can even see fast-moving vehicles like forklifts. The robots are designed to work side by side with humans, which allows your ware- house workers to stay focused on the manual order fulfillment tasks while the VirtualConveyor handles all warehouse travel-related activities. Even in warehouses with mixed in- ventory and products that vary in sizes How to Fetch a more efficient warehouse operation The Fetch Robotics VirtualConveyor system's robots are designed to work in challenging warehouse environments side by side with humans and their other machines, including fast- moving forklifts.