Vecna Robotics today unveiled its new autonomous counterbalanced fork truck, a highly versatile, safe, intelligent and integrated pallet-handling solution. The VRSB 3000 AMR is the first planned release in the company’s Silverback Series of counterbalanced fork trucks. With this new vehicle in the portfolio, Vecna now offers a lineup of both pallet handling and material tugging solutions. By combining the VRSP 3000 with the Vecna tugger, you can deploy a complete dock-to-dock autonomous pallet handling solution. The VRSP 3000 can pick or place a fully loaded pallet onto a tugger train cart.

The machine is capable of a vertical lift of 1360 kg (3000 lbs) up to 1829 mm (72 inches) overhead to help distribution, warehousing, and manufacturing organizations move a wider range of payloads and pallet types, lift inventory to and from equipment, and seamlessly work alongside other materials handling vehicles and human workers to improve efficiency and throughput.

The Vecna VRSB 3000 AMR is capable of 1839 mm reach (image courtesy of Vecna Robotics)

The dimensions of the vehicle are: 2479 mm x 1103 mm x 3337 mm and it weighs in at 1360.7 kg (4700 lbs) without the battery. Runtime for the vehicle is approximate 8 hrs and the system includes auto-charging.

“This is an opportunity to rethink your operations and achieve higher throughput than ever before,” said Daniel Theobald, founder and CEO, Vecna Robotics. “The autonomous counterbalanced fork truck is the next-generation of pallet handling designed for greater versatility and intelligent operational efficiency for organizations. Our new autonomous counterbalanced fork truck allows customers to automate entire workflow processes from end-to-end. This is the future of robot automation and we’re excited to be the trailblazer.”

Vecna Robotics’ Autonomous Fork Truck is a collaborative autonomous mobile robot that can safely operate around humans. However, it is recommended that humans not be present in an aisle where there robot is lifting any pallet overhead. The autonomous counterbalanced fork truck includes dynamic obstacle avoidance to navigate warehouses easily and safely and is compliant with industry regulations such as the ANSI B56.5-2019.

The vehicle includes a wide field of view barcode scanner that is able to completely scan the front face of a pallet on approach. This enables the vehicle to log the pallet id into the warehouse management system (WMS) and confirm that the pallet is the correct item. The Pivotal software can integrate directly to any WMS either through a standard API or the Vecna team can custom integrate to any existing WMS solution.

The Autonomous Fork Truck delivers powerful applications that streamline materials handling and logistics operations, including:

• Flexible Pallet Handling: Supports pallets of varying sizes and weights, including empty, partial, full, irregular, and double-stacked, with and without bottom boards
• Warehouse Material Hauling: Moves pallets floor-to-floor in a facility, including delivering pallets to staging locations within aisles  
• Induction, Extraction, and Sortation: Hands off pallets to and from material handling equipment like conveyors, carts and wrappers
• Opportunistic Material Handling: Transports empty pallets, dunnage, or trash on an as-needed basis

The new solution also leverages Vecna Robotics’ orchestration engine Pivotal™, which analyzes an organization’s operations and adjusts processes accordingly, ensuring every facet performs optimally in real-time. Pivotal shares information across people, robots and systems, and integrates with existing warehouse management solutions. 

Vecna Robotics’ autonomous counterbalanced fork truck is taking orders now and the first units will ship after February 2021.

The company is also offering a 20% discount (tell that the Mobile Robot Guide sent you) if you order before the end of February 2021. [Per Chief Revenue Officer David Clear in the launch announcement]

For more information visit:  https://www.vecnarobotics.com/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-counterbalanced-truck/