The U.S. Navy’s Fleet Readiness Center East at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, recently tested using autonomous vehicles to speed up material handling at a parts warehouse, an experiment to find ways to free up personnel for aircraft maintenance work.
As part of the recent demonstration, an autonomous electric cart entered a warehouse and drove down an aisle to a waiting autonomous forklift, which placed a crate on its bed, Fleet Readiness Center East said on Aug. 24. The event, conducted by the aviation repair and maintenance facility’s Advanced Technology and Innovation team, was the first in a series of demonstrations intended to gauge whether autonomous vehicles can reduce downtime and increase efficiency.
Capt. James Belmont, Fleet Readiness Center East’s commanding officer, says autonomous parts handling vehicles could be used at night to prepare for the next day’s work.
“We could almost become a 24-hr. plant where you have people here during normal working hours, and the third shift becomes the autonomous shift where the big equipment moves happen,” Belmont says. “That way when artisans get to work in the morning, they already have their parts and supplies sitting right there at the workstation.”
Autonomous vehicles could also help eliminate downtime for aircraft maintenance personnel who might get pulled away from their work as they wait for vehicles to transport materials, said Gabriel Garcia, transportation program manager for Fleet Readiness Center East.
“We have artisans who are moving parts from point A to point B, taking support equipment around or bringing a toolbox out to the aircraft,” Garcia said. “We’re paying that artisan to be an aircraft mechanic or electrician, and having an automated system that can bring the toolbox to the aircraft keeps employees doing the job they’re hired to do.”
Autonomous vehicles would likely be used for simple tasks on established routes. The forklift and electric cart were made self-driving using an autonomous material handling technology system, a package of sensors that can be installed on conventional vehicles.
“We could take our vehicles that we currently own and operate in various spaces and bolt on a kit that turns them autonomous,” says Chase Templeton, support equipment and robotics technology lead for the Advanced Technology and Innovation team. “We would still have the ability to run them with a human, but we could also run them completely autonomously with no interaction at all.”
The recent demonstration is the first of several autonomous vehicles tests planned prior to Fleet Readiness Center East deciding to adopt the technology.
“We’re implementing a crawl, walk, run kind of plan,” Templeton said. “We’re going to start with the easiest areas first and then tackle the more complicated processes as we progress the program forward.”
The U.S. Navy’s test of autonomous material handling follows the fast-growing adoption of similar robotic systems in commercial manufacturing and logistics operations. For example, retailing giant Amazon.com uses robots in some of its warehouses to move around goods.
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