It's only funny when it's not your own employees and not even then. Warehouse jobs are not the most attractive or best-paid in the company, but they require prudence and specialist knowledge from skilled workers - and not just since today.

Warehouse logistics was an early area of application for automated systems, and many high-bay warehouses are now only entered by employees for maintenance purposes. However, some tasks could not previously be automated and remained manual work. This is now changing. It is an innovation that comes from several directions: New industrial trucks or storage and retrieval machines are more flexible and require less space, improved sensors map the environment in more detail and faster, and finally, new software takes advantage of the hardware innovations and makes programming easier at the same time.

These innovations are also making themselves felt beyond the warehouse, in the production halls: Transport robots, or autonomous mobile robots (AMR), are no longer restricted to predetermined routes like traditional driverless transport systems, but use route maps, current sensor data and real-time data from other road users to find the fastest route to their destination.

Finally, cobots and robots have also made significant progress, particularly in terms of programmability and price. For less than 10,000 euros, there is a wide range of ready-to-use robotic solutions for a wide variety of intralogistics tasks.

And so this time we have dedicated our focus to the topic of "AGVs, AGVs and robotics". Not for the first time and certainly not for the last time in this highly innovative field. In our cover story on page 30, for example, we report on the use of transport robots in battery production. The particular challenge here was working under clean room conditions. From page 34 onwards, the focus is on software: how can time and resources be saved through optimized plant logistics? Another article starting on page 24 reports on the efforts to integrate various AMRs and AGVs in the plant into a uniform control environment using a new industry standard.

I look forward to interesting innovations and your reactions to this issue!

Yours

Daniel Schilling

Editor-in-Chief