Japanese company Taisei Corporation, in collaboration with industrial robot manufacturer Fanuc, has developed an automated warehouse equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. This warehouse, powered by AI-driven industrial robots, can hold twice the volume of goods compared to traditional warehouses. The new warehouse utilizes robots to automatically load and unload goods of varying sizes and leverages Fanuc's physical AI technology for more flexible logistics operations. This warehouse is expected to help alleviate the long-standing driver shortage problem in the logistics industry. In the future, building more space-saving warehouses closer to consumers, such as in cities, is expected to ease the pressure on "last-mile delivery." In traditional warehouses, goods are typically placed on pallets and then manually or mechanically loaded and unloaded onto shelves. When robots are involved in this process, single-category pallets are usually used, meaning only one type of product is placed on each pallet to reduce the difficulty of robot operation. However, for mixed-load pallets containing multiple products, due to the different sizes and shapes of the goods, manual handling has traditionally been required. The newly developed system utilizes AI technology to accurately identify the size and shape of different products in mixed pallets and control robots to accurately grasp the target products.
