The initial situation
The site in Linden is managed throughout the Group as an innovative flagship site from which solutions are rolled out worldwide. In order to achieve the Group's target of an annual increase in productivity of five percent, processes had to be optimized while maintaining the same number of employees. For this reason, Tucker decided to automate the transportation of goods and the supply of workstations in the future, as conversion measures at the workstations and the use of automatic conveyor technology were not possible due to a lack of space. The manual transportation of small parts from the automated small parts warehouse (AKL) was therefore replaced by autonomous mobile robots - the Open Shuttles from Knapp.

The challenge
The complexity of this solution lay in the constantly changing warehouse environment and the high volume of internal traffic. As all goods are dispatched from the Linden site, the goods are delivered, transferred, picked, packed and dispatched again here. Pallets are stored in the warehouse in positions in the open area and are constantly repositioned. The Open Shuttles move along the divided travel paths and supply two workstations at sorting machines with small parts. On this route, they have to avoid obstacles such as other transport vehicles like forklifts or pallet trucks, people and pallets parked in the aisle. Due to the dynamic environment, it was therefore not possible to set marker points such as reflectors or lines. Tucker had to rely on the shuttles to navigate freely. This was another reason why the open shuttles were a suitable solution.

The solution
To meet Tucker's requirements, three open shuttles for container transportation were integrated into the existing warehouse structure. These take over the automatic transports from the small parts warehouse to the decentralized workstations.
The customer system transfers the orders to the KiSoft FMS fleet management system, which distributes the transport orders to the Open Shuttles. The orders are then carried out autonomously by the individual shuttles.
Once the goods have been delivered on pallets from the production plants in Giessen, they are separated and stored at the workstations in the automated small parts warehouse. If goods are now requested from the small parts warehouse at one of the two decentralized workstations, KiSoft FMS transmits the pick-up order to the shuttles. An Open Shuttle then drives to the source station, a defined transfer point at the miniload, and picks up the container independently. As soon as the transfer process is complete, the Open Shuttle starts its journey to the destination station.

During the journey, the Open Shuttle continuously checks whether there are any obstacles in the way and automatically avoids them or re-plans its path if a route is completely impassable. At the destination station, the Open Shuttle automatically hands over the container. The employee can then process the container. Once processing is complete and the container is no longer required, it is placed on a source conveyor system ready for automatic removal by the Open Shuttle. A transport requirement is automatically transmitted to KiSoft FMS for this purpose. The software then automatically generates a transport order and transmits it to the Open Shuttles. An Open Shuttle that is nearby and available takes the container from the conveyor system and transports it to the miniload for restocking. The Open Shuttles have an intelligent load management system. If the Open Shuttle does not currently have an order to process, it moves independently to the next loading station as required.

The Open Shuttles have integrated very well into the structures at Tucker and are also seen by the employees as support in their work. The little colleagues with the names R2D2, C3PO and BB8 have been warmly welcomed. Additional Open Shuttles can be added to the existing fleet quickly and easily. This means that nothing stands in the way of further increases in productivity at the Giessen plants.