How can we develop a teleoperated solution that can retrofit onto brand-agnostic industrial trucks?

BACKGROUND

Teleoperation is the use of human operators, manning a station at a command and control center, remote operating a piece of machinery or vehicle from afar. The remote operator has full control over the vehicle, handling the different driving mechanisms like decision making, steering, accelerating, braking and navigating.

To move goods within each warehouse space in our multi-site building at Toll City, industrial trucks (Forklifts, Reach Trucks) are commonly utilised. Each site has its own dedicated fleet of trucks. Like most resources, there are on peak and off peak periods for their utilisation, but often falling on the latter scenario. Therefore, we would like to consider optimizing the utilisation rate of these trucks, which could result in less trucks required overall, by sharing, managing and remote controlling them from a central location.

Most ready to implement teleoperating solutions in the market are retrofitted on autonomous vehicles/forklifts (AV), given the ease and availability of software integration methods (APIs) that are tied to specific control types. The use case is focused mainly to manage exceptions in case of AV breakdowns.

In our case, we like to apply to manually driven industrial branded forklifts only. This meant extra considerations have to be made in terms of installing the right fitted actuators, sensors and cameras to control existing driving mechanism in the manual forklift.

REQUIREMENTS

Technological / Performance criteria:

• During POC phase, this machine shall be placed and operated in a controlled/simulated environment where there will be no actual operation.
• Forklifts shall be able to perform the standard forklift mechanical actions e.g. lifting and stacking of pallets on level ground and onto a rack.
• The machine should be able to reach up to 2.5m/3m during the POC phase, in about the same time that human operator can achieve onsite.
• Forklifts should have a certain level of safety such as 360 view of the forklift, sensor for obstacle detection and prevention.
• The solution can be applied to a brand of choice by the start-up, but should demonstrate minimal effort to adapt to new forklift models.

Cost: TBD

Timeframe: 6-8 months

Potential market / business opportunity: All of Toll warehousing facilities could potentially apply this.

DESIRED OUTCOME

A teleoperating station sitting in innovation centre, that can oversee/control a forklift by a human to move, lift and stack goods:

• from point A to B on a flat ground
• from point A on a flat ground to a rack location
• from a rack location to point A on a flat ground

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Toll can provide:

• A test environment in our warehouse and network set up
• A working office in their innovation centre
• Developers experienced in mechanical and software design from the startup

Contact / source: EnterpriseSG Trade and Connectivity - Trade and Connectivity Challenge – 4th Edition (innovation-challenge.sg)