Design the lift truck of your future
So one day on your lunch break you’re reading an engineering magazine and an article stops you in mid-chew. It’s about a new unmanned remote-controlled forklift being developed by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. It shows how the same kind of forked workhorses used in your warehouse may someday be doing similar work in war zones, but keeping human operators out of harm’s way. These computer-controlled vehicles will be equipped with multiple LIDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors to understand their terrain and the location of pallets or people nearby. Someone will command the forklift remotely using a handheld PDA equipped with wireless Ethernet and voice controls.
You want one, right? The problem is, they don’t exist yet—at least not commercially. What can you do?
Talk to Roger Bostelman, project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His job is to test the feasibility of new technologies in new applications. It just so happens that Bostelman will be presenting a paper on how 3D imagers can make forklifts used in industrial environments safer. He used a 3D Flash LIDAR camera with a 7 meter range and rapid detection in his experiments. These experiments included:
1) detection of standard sized obstacles,
2) detection of obstacles while highly reflective surfaces are also within detection range
3) detection of forklift tines above the floor.
“These sensors would indicate when a pedestrian passes or where the edge of a dock or the back of a truck is,” Bostelman told me. And during the ninth annual “Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS ’09)” conference, to be held Sept. 21-23 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, he’s hoping to get as much information as he gives.
“We’ll have a group discussion on recommendations for next generation forklifts to become safer,” he said. “I’ll take information from the group that shows up at this special session, summarize it, and begin to put it in a white paper. The goal is to determine the next areas of R&D for manufacturers to think about.”
His motivation? He wants to standardize performance measurements and determine how well this new technology can see around loads. Many times operators drive forklifts without full view of their surroundings.
“We want to see if these sensors create enough information to alert the driver,” he added. “Even the best trained operator out there might not know that a pedestrian walked in front of them. There are sensors out there already, but they’re expensive for a forklift company."
Even so, he envisions a time when a forklift will incorporate a robotic arm and we’ll have true human/robot collaboration. Bostelman is working with the Robot Industry of America to determine what needs to be done to reach that goal. And RIA wants to put that kind of language in the ANSI/RIA/ISO 10218 standard.
LIDAR sensors have yet to see broad application in the industrial world and standards still needs to catch up on real world capabilities. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the technology and can see its value to your operations, Bostelman wants your input. He’s collecting such information and sharing it with commercial technology manufacturers so it will one day be widely available.
Bottom line: don’t be a passive consumer. If you have ideas about improving your lift truck safety and productivity and want to see if they’re doable, there are R&D partners out there who will work with you. Roger Bostelman is living proof. Meet him at PerMIS ’09 or e-mail him at roger.bostelman@nist.gov.
Tom Andel
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