Heavy-duty conveyor modules for safe interaction between people, forklift vehicles and goods in intralogistics

As technical developments in intralogistics continue to advance, the production efficiency of large corporations and companies is also increasing. Their warehouses are becoming increasingly fully automated, while small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are still heavily reliant on manual intralogistics processes. To enable SMEs to remain competitive, this research is directed towards a multidirectional heavy-duty conveyor module that is designed to support warehouse staff by automatically moving goods across the warehouse floor in parallel with existing operations. Individual modules should function by means of plug-and-play to allow the simplest possible integration and maintenance. In addition to mechanical load requirements for individual modules, a further challenge lies in path planning and control to ensure an efficiently and collision-free operation of the collective modular floor. Therefore, two questions will be answered in this paper: First, how does such a modular tile look like and what does it consist of? Second, what must the overall control concept look like in order to achieve an increase in efficiency for SMEs? In this paper a mechanical concept for an innovative new modular transport method for warehouse settings is presented. Additionally, the corresponding control concept is derived. Key factors to consider in the development of the mechanical part are the method of transportation with a limited budget such that an SME is able to profit off of it. Furthermore, the module is tasked with transporting goods weighting a couple of tons and enduring weights of loaded forklifts when not being used actively, thus enabling a restrictive-free floor where workers and forklifts can operate freely. To guarantee the latter part the controlling system must be able to avoid collisions with humans and other goods while still performing their own tasks. At the end of this paper the concept of a promising heavy-duty conveyor module with a corresponding movement algorithm is achieved.