Enabling flexible material flow for smart warehouses and smart factories
The strong growth in e-commerce and consumer expectations for ever-increasing product variety and fast delivery present logistics companies and manufacturers with unprecedented challenges. The digitisation of industry will enable faster, more flexible and more efficient manufacturing, including mass customisation, to meet these challenges but material flow systems have not kept up with the huge strides made in manufacturing. Even current state-of-the-art systems are mechanical constructions that take up a lot of space, whose layout cannot be changed once built and which can carry out only a single pre-defined function. Cellumation's innovation is the celluveyor, a multi-functional software-driven conveying and positioning system designed to make material flow systems faster, completely flexible and more efficient. The system's core consists of hexagonal cells with several individually driven omnidirectional wheels. These cells form a flat surface, in a ""Lego""-like structure, with the moving wheels uppermost. Objects sit on this surface and are moved by the action of the turning wheels. Each system takes up to 95% less space than competing systems, can handle all functions required and the function can be changed by customers' staff with a few clicks on a laptop. Cellumation has sold nine TRL6 prototype systems in Germany, Spain and the UK. The market is huge at €26bn+: every factory and every logistics centre has conveyor belts. Cellumation has keen buying interest from several well-known manufacturing companies in the EU and the US. The objectives of this project are to reduce cell costs by 50%, to expand functionality to include limp plastics as well as smaller objects and to ensure that our software and the entire system are easy to use. Cellumation's goal is for celluveyor to become the state-of-the-art conveyor technology and a key part of the distribution centres and manufacturing plants of the future.