Climbing Robots in the Warehouse

The RackBot System Elevate is a new goods-to-person solution designed to economically automate order picking processes in shelving systems up to 12 meters high. At the heart of the solution is a fully integrated swarm of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), known as ClimbBots. Thanks to their combined climbing and driving capabilities, the ClimbBots can navigate all horizontal and vertical pathways within the warehouse.

The roaming concept of the robot swarm ensures that every AMR can operate in all aisles and areas of the warehouse and access any container. If one of the bots should ever fail, the remaining vehicles can take over its tasks at any time.

Because SSI Schäfer has integrated the robot control into the warehouse’s order management system, all required picking steps can be optimally sequenced—and batched if needed. As a result, the time between order creation and container delivery by the ClimbBots can be reduced to under two minutes. Furthermore, the risk of picking errors is virtually eliminated, according to the company.

Thanks to their compact design, the bots can operate in aisles as narrow as 900 mm. Their agility eliminates the need for cross-aisles. In a 12-meter-high facility, up to 30,000 storage locations can be created on a 1,000 m² footprint. In such an environment, throughput rates of up to 4,000 containers per 1,000 m² per hour are possible. Depending on the picked items, between 200 and 800 containers can be transported to the employee’s picking workstation per hour, according to the company.

Rapid Payback

"Until recently, semi-automated goods-to-person systems were primarily attractive to companies that could reliably forecast their picking processes. Investing in such solutions required stable business development—usually over a period of seven to ten years," explains Markus Külken of SSI Schäfer. With the new product, this perspective is now fundamentally changing: “We are combining powerful, proven standard components into a fully integrated overall solution with an extremely short payback period—often under a year. This not only lowers the barrier to entry but also enables sound investment decisions in semi-automated warehouse solutions, even in cases of dynamic growth, seasonal fluctuations, or uncertain business conditions.”

Thanks to the high scalability of the RackBot System Elevate, a wide range of applications is possible—from small shelving warehouses with a few thousand containers to facilities with six-figure container quantities. This makes the solution suitable both for entry into semi-automated warehousing and for business cases involving the integration of goods-to-person solutions into fully automated large-scale systems with high performance requirements.

As a general contractor, SSI Schäfer supplies all components of the robotics solution and manages all trades required for the construction of a semi-automated picking warehouse. The automation experts place particular emphasis on integrating robot control with order management—regardless of which software solution the customer uses. Additional integration services include connecting inbound goods, distribution, and production supply systems.