New Warehouse Robot May Obsolete the Forklift
The warehouses of the world are surprisingly empty spaces. There’s a lot of material in these vital nodes of the complex global commodities transportation system, but there’s also a lot of vacant space on the floor between their racks. The space is there to make room for the forklift, the workhorse of the warehouse, which must have room to maneuver when lifting and carrying pallets loaded down with hundreds or thousands of pounds of merchandise. A forklift needs a lot of space and a professional driver to do a mundane but dangerous task.
A new robotics firm recognizes an improved approach to warehouse management. Mytra, a company created by former employees of Tesla and Rivian, wants to automate and combine warehouse activities by using a robot and a storage rack system to improve the efficiency of products moving. It can also make the forklift obsolete.
The system has a complicated yet basic design. Mytra, which consists of a pallet-sized robot and a three-dimensional steel cell matrix, picks up and moves objects using specially made mechanics and software to speed up moving them into and out of the warehouse while optimizing how they’re stored.
According to Chris Walti, cofounder and CEO of Mytra, “we wanted to go after the simplest problem in the whole industry, which is just moving things around from one place in the factory or warehouse to another.” He also points out that between 40% and 80% of the work done in a typical facility is done within the warehouse. He had direct familiarity with it from his prior position managing Tesla’s warehouse logistics, which, like many warehouse operations, depended on pallet racks and forklifts.
Walti realized a fresh approach was required. He recognized the potential benefits of new robotics and automation technologies in his capacity as the leader of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot project. Walti founded Mytra with Ahmad Baitalmal, who oversaw factory software at Tesla and Rivian. The robot in the company’s system is specially made to move in three dimensions and lift up to three thousand pounds. It operates inside a grid of cells that resembles a cage. Last month, the network of Albertson’s supermarket stores started using Mytra’s initial system.
Warehouse robots are already transporting and hauling things for businesses, ranging from DHL to Amazon, so this is not completely new ground. However, Walti claims that Mytra’s method automates a lot more of the movement and tasks that occur in a normal warehouse, most of which require assembling mixed pallets. Worker activity in the warehouse resembles a shopping run. And that calls for a great deal of manual labor. Going to every station and lifting a sack of concrete or a case of Coca-Cola is backbreaking, according to Walti. “Most of this can be automated by our system.”
A New Kind of Warehouse Robot. According to Walti, the robot at the center of this system is a significant advancement for the sector. He claims that no mobile robot can move over 100 pounds in a vertical direction. The steel grid structure that comprises Mytra’s racks, and a specially created screw-drive mechanism at each of the robot’s four corners, which employs mechanical leverage to ascend and descend, work together to enable Mytra’s 3,000-pound vertical load limit.
The company’s unique selling point is the grid system, which eliminates the need for the aisles that take up valuable space in forklift-based warehouse operations. The rack system’s cellular nature allows for any size or shape configuration. There are 36 cells in Albertson’s initial installation. According to Walti, Mytra is in discussions with other clients about possible uses involving tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of cells. He claims, “We’re bringing software re-configurability to physical space.”
The traditional warehouse might change thanks to Mytra’s robot-based approach. However, according to Walti, “forklifts are still superb at loading things in trailers and stacking pallets on a dock,” so the forklift’s day may not be over entirely. All it does is make a great deal fewer of them necessary.