The research project “MAG-IA” aimed to adapt warehouse standards to the new philosophy of Industry 4.0.
The project was partially funded by the Tuscany Region under the POR FESR 2014-2020. It was developed in 24 months by a Consortium composed by Big Companies, SMEs, and Research Centers.
Firstly, Cassioli srl, a company developing, manufacturing and distributing intelligent warehouses and logistic solutions for a worldwide market, acted as project coordinator and system integrator.
Aitronik Srl had the responsibility of designing a novel vision-based safety system for indoor autonomous vehicles. The embedded system, made of a camera and custom-designed, AI-based algorithms, augmented safety laser scanners to detect obstacles. Researchers trained the neural networks to specifically recognize people in the environment, and detect their positions around the robot.
Readytec S.p.a designed the Human Machine Interface, to interconnect human operators with the intelligent warehouse.
Pressofonderie S.r.l. manufactured the prototype of a novel autonomous platform, and designed the “One Tool” strategy that simplifies the maintenance of autonomous machines.
Last but not least, the University of Pisa provided a fundamental contribution by designing the overall energy propulsion systems for the set of machines designed.
While acting as a whole, all the partners provided great effort in achieving the results of MAG-IA, which can be summarized as follows:
- Scalability: the stacker cranes were replaced by groups of rail-mounted machines, and the warehouse had the chance to be activated or deactivated on different levels with significant energy savings.
- Simplicity: transport facilities were designed with the “One Tool” strategy, only one tool required to open and unmount different structural parts.
- Volumetric Efficiency: new storage units had a larger capacity.
- Smart: high-tech components were developed and used, to provide useful information on several parts of the automatic warehouse.
- Green: all the solutions designed focused on energy saving through energy recovery and splitting of the installed power into more stand-alone subsystems.
- Reduction: sensible reduction of raw materials was achieved to manufacture the shuttles.
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In order to comply with the European regulation for funded projects, we declare here that Aitronik received financial support of 164.946,30 €.
