Draft of Forklift Automation

In this society where all must go faster and faster in less and less space, the man can only be replaced by automated machines, quicker and smaller. So I try to represent here my vision of storage warehouse with automated lifttrucks

I am a second year student from France at the ASM Materials Education Foundation in Cleveland.

For this concept I had to use Fusion 360 for all the modeling and blender for the animation(I am more used to, however I have recently discovered that fusion 360 has really easier mechanisms to understand and learn than blender, I can only recommend it).

To design the way of moving of the lifttruck I first looked at what could already propose similar project such as in the big warehouses of Amazon. I have all the same run up against a big problem, the weight of the loads that the lifttrucks must transport. Indeed, while Amazon's robots only move small to medium size parcels for individuals, in this project we have to deal with much more massive parcels.

This represents two challenges, the overall strength of the machine on a surface as small as possible and an autonomy as important as possible that does not require the factory to be stopped every hour.

After reflexion I decided to start on the modeling of rails. Indeed, the raills allow at the same time a very good stability, a very good durability, as well as the possibility of connecting conductive bands which would feed in real time the forklifts what allows to assure a continuous service without the need to have many forklifts on standby.

In spite of all, this design with the help of rails allowing to reduce the space taken by the forklift truck leads to a new problem: how to slide the forks of the truck under the package?

To answer this problem I had again to take a time of reflexion, the solution that I drew from it is based on a combination of mechanics on the part of the cart (in a first time), then of the shelves had even mechanized. To understand this more easily I made a short example:

I opted here for a system without any mechanism. I opted for a system using only the gravity. The concept here, is that the carriage while descending, passes these forks through others (inclined) which will then naturally make slide the parcel under its own weight until the conveyor belts.

This mechanism has obviously in counterpart of its simplicity, two notable disadvantages:

• brutality
• probability of not directing correctly the package to the conveyor belt.

These two negative points are obviously very important and cannot be neglected, in the case of a real large scale production, it would be necessary to make many tests to determine the validity of this system.

Thanks to everyone who will read this tutorial, this project allowed me to understand the great complexity of setting up a robot farm. Even if my project can seem coherent at first sight, during my imagination process I realized many points that I did not address here but which would make the achievement of this project impossible without very long reflexion and studies such as :

• the maximum height of the lifttruck,
• the precise tracking of those for their alignment so that there is no problem during the reception of the parcels,
• the exit of machine for various maintenance,
• the access of human on site without danger,
• etc.

All these numerous non-elucidated black points cannot be solved without taking the time, meticulously to analyze them correctly.

However I hope that this project was interesting to discover despite these many shortcomings, and that it was a real learning experience for you because as Leo Buscaglia said: Change is the end result of all true learning