Project Overview

Because of a great variety of SKUs, the retailing industry demands extremely high throughput of supply chain to respond rapidly to stores' restocking needs.

The customer in this case is Watsons, a well-known consumer goods retailer. The project is located at Watsons' warehouse in Wuhan. The warehouse receives and stores products from upstream suppliers, then delivers them to regional chains and online consumers.

The customer deploys XYZ Robotics' depalletizing and mixed-case palletizing system to depalletize and palletize totes, depalletize carton boxes and place them in totes. Cooperating with AGVs and miniload, XYZ Robotics' multifunctional robotic system helps Watsons achieve automated inbound and outbound.

Working Scenarios

01 Outbound tote palletizing

AGVs transport totes to the robot, and the robot will palletize totes on pallets. The system supports continued palletizing on pallets loaded with totes already.

02 Inbound tote depalletizing

The vision-guided robot depalletizes totes with SKUs on the pallet and places them on the conveyor. Then, AGVs will transport and store totes in the warehouse.

03 Carton box depalletizing and in-tote palletizing

The robot recognizes mixed carton boxes on partitioned areas on one pallet, scans barcodes on them and places them into totes. The algorithm plans space-effective placement of boxes in totes smartly to ensure the optimal loading rate.

Project Challenges

In this case, 5 layers of totes are densely packed, demanding suitable gripper and accurate vision recognition.

01 There are no gaps left for gripper to pick by opposite sides of totes. Therefore, a custom gripper is designed to pick totes by adjacent sides stably.

02  Densely packed totes demands high vision segmentation accuracy and large field of view. Deficiency of either requirements may lead to inaccurate handling and dumping of totes.

XYZ Robotics' Solutions

01 100% accuracy with eye-in-hand camera

The eye-in-hand camera features high precision and large field of view. It recognizes densely-packed totes and carton boxes on partitioned areas on pallets accurately.

02 Depalletize densely-packed totes in 8 s/case

The custom gripper picks totes efficiently without gaps reserved between them. Palletizing on non-empty pallets also enhances the storage efficiency.

03 Handle both carton box and tote

Smart switch between grippers enables the robot to handle both totes and carton boxes, and thus suiting more pick-and-place applications.

04 Placement planning of carton boxes in totes

Smart switch between grippers enables the robot to handle both totes and carton boxes, and thus suiting more pick-and-place applications.

With innovative machine vision and robotic intelligence software platform, XYZ Robotics will help more e-commerce and retail businesses automate their warehouses and distribution, building more intelligent, efficient, and flexible supply chains.