With its first autonomous mobile robot (AMR), Elster GmbH is starting to automate the internal material transport at its Lotte site near Osnabrück (Germany). In a pilot project with Jungheinrich, the company is benefiting from the advantages of automated material handling for the first time.
Hamburg / Lotte – Elster GmbH, part of the Honeywell group and a leading manufacturer of premium products and system solutions for the safety, measurement and control of gases, has successfully automated part of its in-house material flow with its first autonomous mobile robot (AMR) from Jungheinrich. Since the beginning of July, an EAE 212a has been supplying production with materials at the Lotte site, replacing transport tasks previously carried out manually. The project is deliberately set up as a pilot: in day-to-day operation, Elster is finding out what efficiency gains automated material handling delivers in practice.
One vehicle, twelve stations: from manual transport to automated supply
Until now, internal material transport at the site has been carried out manually, making it time-consuming and dependent on staff availability. With the AMR, Elster is opting for a flexible, easy-to-implement solution to automate recurring transport tasks and relieve its employees of routine journeys.
The EAE 212a picks up pallets at a transfer station and moves them to different drop-off points in production. In total, the Mobile Robot serves twelve stations along a route of around 210 metres, carrying loads on euro pallets (EPAL 1). With a load capacity of up to 1,200 kilograms, the low-lift AMR is designed for floor-level pallet transport. A powerful lithium-ion battery and automatic intermediate charging keep the vehicle continuously ready for use.
Integration without changes to the warehouse
No structural modifications are needed for operation: the EAE 212a navigates entirely without artificial landmarks and copes with changing floor surfaces along its route. The vehicle detects obstacles on its own and drives around them autonomously. This ensures a safe flow of materials in mixed operation alongside people. Jungheinrich’s scope of supply comprises the AMR itself together with the Mobile Robot Control and the necessary I/O periphery. Designed as a scalable solution, the system can be expanded with additional vehicles at any time as the need arises.
‘With the Mobile Robot, we have automated part of our internal transport for the first time. For us, this is a deliberate step: we want to test in practice how we can automate recurring journeys and deploy our employees on more value-adding tasks,’ said Thomas Stegemann, Head of Strategic Logistics at Elster GmbH. ‘What convinced us above all was developing the solution together in a transparent way, and how quickly this project was implemented.’
Dr Andreas Rücker, Project Manager Logistics Systems at Jungheinrich, added: ‘The EAE 212a is ideal precisely for getting started with automation: it can be integrated quickly and without interfering with existing processes, and it grows with requirements over time. This means Elster can first gather experience with a single vehicle and then expand the solution step by step.’
