Chapter 4.0
Safety in automated warehouses
To help you understand the safety challenges in automated warehouse environments, the following sections outlines both existing and emerging risks associated with automated systems.
The evolution of automation
Given the rapid introduction and growth of automation, some safety issues may be overlooked, or challenges may appear too great to tackle. We are offering strategies and products that will help you achieve a high degree of workplace safety in these changing environments.
The shift toward automation in logistics
During the last 10 years, all industrialized countries have seen a strong growth in online shopping, which was fueled by the 2020 to 2022 COVID19-pandemic.
This has resulted in a dramatic change in the methods and systems employed for storage, retrieval, order picking, packing, and shipping of goods. Many warehouses are high-tech sites already while automation continues penetrating more and more areas of logistics and goods handling. The need for more versatile and efficient storage and retrieval solutions has driven changes in both existing warehouses (brownfield) and new installations (greenfield).
New technologies bring new risks
As automation grows, so do the safety challenges - especially where people and machines interact.
The retrieval strategies “goods-to-person” and “person-to-goods” require the implementation of both fixed (stationary) automation systems such as storage and retrieval (S/R) machines, buffer storages, carousels and sorters.
Additionally, we are seeing swarms of guided and autonomous vehicles roam both warehouse and production environments (AGVs and AMRs, which are often referred to collectively as IMRs – industrial mobile robots). Collaborative and industrial robots pick and place items and packages in case and each picking scenarios. Some of these robots have even started moving about autonomously, on top of an AMR, driving on their own wheels, or “walking” on four to six legs like insects.
However, there are still people around all these automated systems. Particularly in brown field applications, people at their workplaces mingle with different automation systems. Also, highly automated areas must be entered regularly by staff to fix problems and perform maintenance work. The changes have resolved some previous safety issues but have also resulted in new risks.
