Elegant Robotics: Redefining Automation for Warehouse Efficiency

Decoding elegant robotics: Unveiling the future of warehouse automation
If you’ve spent any time reading our website, you’ve probably come across the term ‘elegance’ more than once. It’s easy to dismiss it as just another slogan in the vast sea of content marketing, but for us at Exotec^®, it’s not just a marketing phrase, it’s a design philosophy.

Mathematics 101

The approach is based on the idea of mathematical elegance. It’s about finding solutions and proofs that are surprisingly simple yet insightful. There are many definitions of mathematical elegance, but the key principles are generally as follows:

• Simplicity: An elegant mathematical proof or solution tends to be simple, going straight to the heart of the problem, without unnecessary steps or complicated calculations.
• Creativity: Elegant solutions often involve an innovative or unexpected approach to the problem. They can use creativity to get around an apparently difficult or complex problem.
• Generality: If a solution not only solves the problem in question, but can also be applied to a wider class of similar problems, it can be considered more elegant. Proofs that cover a general case rather than a specific case are often elegant.

Ultimately, elegant solutions simplify complex things.

Managing complexity

Warehouses are complex. They store, pick, pack and ship thousands or even millions of items every day, with little or no room for error. Unfortunately, this means that automated solutions designed for warehouses often reflect this complexity with convoluted designs that require a huge amount of engineering to implement and maintain. Traditional automated storage and retrieval (AS/RS) solutions illustrate this point perfectly.

Let’s take the example of a traditional shuttle system. These systems typically consist of shuttles dedicated to specific aisles and a complex series of lifts and conveyors that move goods between different levels of an aisle and deliver them to warehouse operators. This complexity imposes strict limits on the system, particularly in terms of the flexibility of the solution. Scaling up a shuttle system, for example, would require significant modifications to the existing infrastructure, costing time and money. Not to mention that if a single point in the system (such as the lift) were to fail, a large part of the stock could become inaccessible for an extended period.

Making things easy is difficult

At Exotec, we’ve strived to make things easy from the moment our autonomous mobile robots leave our manufacturing facility in France, right through to installation, maintenance and, ultimately, adapting the system to changing customer needs. This is made possible by the choices we have made in designing the Skypod^® system. The main components of our system are

• Storage: The simple design of our static racks enables rapid deployment (a few weeks) and easy extension (a few days) of existing systems. We also offer a choice of storage bins and trays for picking orders by the piece or by the case.
• The robots: Our robots are the only mobile part of the system. Each robot is agnostic, which means that even in the event of a breakdown, the system continues to operate and prioritise the most urgent orders with the rest of the fleet. This also allows for fast recovery times of two minutes or less for all SKUs in the system.
• Order Picking Stations: The stations allow operators to stand in one place while our Skypod robots move from the racks to the stations with the items needed for each order. Everything from the height of the bins and screens to the padded resting cushions has been designed to reduce strain and fatigue for human operators.
• The software: Our end-to-end warehouse software orchestrates every element of the Skypod system and coordinates it with third-party equipment. The software uses advanced algorithms that connect to any WMS and WCS to co-ordinate and optimise order fulfilment.

Your warehouse is complex, your automated solutions don’t have to be.

Instead of iterating on existing AS/RS designs, we’ve invented a new one, with every component designed to be simple to deploy, operate, maintain and scale. We know your warehouse operations are complex, and we don’t want to add to them. We don’t do long-term projects that require years of planning and assembling different bespoke solutions. Instead, we sell products. Modular, high-performance and reliable. That’s what ‘Elegance’ means at Exotec.

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