At the end of April, I visited the Decathlon warehouse and looked at the robotic order picking system.
In Domodedovo, next to the Central Ring Road, there are three huge warehouses - Auchan, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon.
NISSA Engineering, which has implemented the largest fleet of warehouse robots in Russia at Decathlon warehouses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, invited me to see how it works.
90% of the warehouse is occupied by huge racks with goods, boxes with which are moved by forklifts. These racks supply stores.
The bottleneck was the collection of online orders. Now all the goods are laid out on the racks, which are moved by robots.
When assembling an order, the operator stands still, and robots automatically bring the necessary racks to it.
The screen shows where the box with the desired product is on the rack.
There are practically no errors during assembly, as every product in Decathlon has an RFID tag and the operator reads it before placing the product in a box, the contents of which are sent to the buyer.
In total, there are about 400 racks in the robotic warehouse.
The robots are assisted by QR codes on the floor and on the bottoms of the shelves.
Multiple racks move at the same time.
This map shows what each of the 46 robots is doing at a given time.
While on one side of the warehouse, robots and operators collect orders, on the other side, other operators fill containers with new goods.
The lifting platform of the robot can support a weight of up to 2.5 tons.
There are several charging stations between the racks and the robots automatically recharge as needed.
In 5 minutes, the robot was charged at 2700 mAh. The charging current is almost 30 amperes, the voltage is 58 volts (more than 1700 watts, however).
It's funny that Decathlon has a soccer field right in the middle of the warehouse for employees.
A story about how robots famously move containers would not be interesting without a video, so I removed and mounted it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch? v = lds_1ZRRJk8
Of course, this is not yet a fully automatic warehouse without people, where robots not only find the goods they need, but also collect them in boxes and pack them themselves, but a system where robots and people work together has already increased the order picking speed by 7.5 times and solved the problem of long waiting times for online orders buyers.
© 2021, Alexey Nadezhin
For ten years I have been writing every day about technology, discounts, places of interest and events. Read my blog on the site ammo1.ru, in LJ, Zen, Mirtesen, Telegram.
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Lamptest.ru. I test LED lamps and help figure out which ones are good and which ones are not so good.
Elerus.ru. I collect information about domestic electronic devices for personal use and share it.
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