Improvement of shuttle and lift positioning in an automated warehouse system

摘要

The focus of this master’s thesis is to develop methods to improve shuttle and lift fine-positioning in a multi-level automated warehouse system. These methods are to be used in existing sites to improve system performance, as also in future site projects.The multi-level automated warehouse system examined in this thesis study is provided for customer by the system supplier in order to increase efficiency of the warehousing operation. During the system launch, there have been some issues with shuttle and lift positioning, which has led to standstills. In order to ensure best possible perform of the system for the customer, the precision of the shuttle and lift positioning should be improved. This allows minimizing the downtime of the system, and gives customer best possible access to stored items.System performance and error logs were monitored during this master’s thesis work. This allowed identification of individual shuttles and lifts with fine-positioning errors. Operation of these storage retrieval machines were improved by sensor alignment, sensor replacement or with other procedures. As a result of this thesis work, several methods to ease sensor alignment or to improve the positioning process were presented.