Yale Material Handling Corp. and Balyo partner to deliver fully autonomous lift trucks.
A major aspect of manufacturing is material handling: moving materials in, out and around facilities. This process has historically been a manual one, to the displeasure of many blue-collar workers, but now this task is being automated.
In the video above, we take a look at how lift trucks for palletizing, among other applications, are now becoming easier to use and even autonomous.
“Through the years, we’ve done considerable research and what we found from the Department of Labor Statistics is that 36 percent of material handlers turnover annually,” said Lou Micheletto, manager of integrated solutions at Yale Materials Handling Corporation.
Yale Materials Handling approached Balyo, a developer of AGVs (automated guided vehicles), which provided the technology and software to automate Yale’s lift trucks and together developed the robotic lift trucks.
Yale’s robotic lift trucks do not require remodeling of facility floors, instead using uploaded maps and vision technology to navigate their surroundings and react to dynamic obstacles, such as conventional AGVs.
Additionally, operators can switch the truck between autonomous and manual control with minimal training.
“By grabbing a handle, you can convert the truck to a manual operation,” Micheletto explained. “Staff can take control of the truck, do what they need to do, bring it back to a virtual path, touch a button twice and it’s back doing its operations autonomously.”
For more information, watch the video above and visit the Yale Materials Handling Corporation and Balyo websites.
