NEWS | BY KIVNON
Warehouse management system with 26 rotational AGV with lifting platform
Faurecia, one of the world’s leading automotive technology companies, has installed in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, an end of line buffer, sequence and warehouse, to provide car seats to an international automaker (OEM).
Seats are delivered directly sequenced to the OEM overhead conveyor. For the implementation of the Warehouse Management System, Faurecia has placed their trust in Kivnon AGV K05 Twister. It is an automated guided vehicle with 360º rotation capacity on its axis, specially conceived for confined spaces, as the plant located in Vitoria requires.
“This Warehouse Management System that Kivnon built for Faurecia is showing exactly where the market of AGV´s is going. Besides the traditional trips for an AGV to take material from A to B, we now experience a higher demand for extremely intelligent technologies and programming of the routes of our AGVs. In this way, we help the customer to take the internal logistics and their Warehouse Management Systems to the next level“, declared Rob Keij, Sales Director at Kivnon.
Through a handling weightless system, workers transfer the car seat from the end of the line to the AGV. Which then takes care of delivering it to a loading robot, that, synchronized with the sequence, picks it up and indicates the AGV when it can return to the initial position to start another cycle. Once the automated guided vehicle is released, the robot hands it to OEM’s overhead conveyor.
An automatic, secure and reliable system that, thanks to in loop battery charging stations, can work 24 hours 7 days. In addition, Kivnon’s lifting platform comes equipped with an RFID reader to identify seats ID and confirm is the requested by the OEM. Overall, 26 AGVs and 200 carts are required for this process that moves a very high number of seats per day.
“This system has managed to automate the whole loading system, storage seats sequencing in a warehouse at level zero, thereby facilitating the control system and backup if necessary. All this with a very flexible system that allows quick layout modifications. It has an the opportunity to increase capacity in a very fast and simple way, such as increasing the number of AGVs in the flux”, assures César Lafraya, Plant Director at Faurecia in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
