From Manufacturing to Logistics: Development of a Kinematic for Autonomous Unloading of Containers

Abstract

In many branches of production and manufacturing the level of automation has reached saturation. Further automation would be possible but would also affect negatively their economic efficiency. On the contrary, in logistics the level of automation is low due to the lack of process standardization. This is caused on the one hand by the high number of protagonists involved in global supply chains and on the other hand by the weak demand for standardization that characterizes areas with low costs of labor. Among the logistics processes the highest challenge for automation is the unloading of goods from carriers, i. e. containers, which are used for international and intermodal transports. In containers a wide range of goods is transported among which, unpalettized mass goods have the highest relevance for autonomous unloading, because of their size, shape and weight. Mass goods are arbitrarily packed neatly or loose, stuck or slack patterns and with respect to their properties homogeneous or heterogeneous. Nowadays these containers are unloaded mostly manually. A system for the autonomous unloading of all the kinds of mass goods from containers doesnt exist as a market ready product. This paper presents a kinematic suited to unload all kinds of mass goods from a container.