animal (ware)house

If you attended this year's ProMat show in Chicago, there probably were moments when you thought you had accidentally wandered into a zoo. Certainly, many of the exhibiting companies' names brought animals to mind. Here are some that caught our eye as we wandered the aisles:

• Big Ass Fans (industrial overhead fans; a long-time favorite of the DCV editorial staff)
• Factory Cat (industrial cleaning equipment)
• Fox IV Technologies (printing systems)
• Frog AGV Systems (two-for-one: U.S. headquarters has an address on North Squirrel Road)
• Hammerhead Industries (retractable tethers)
• Kurt Salmon Associates (consulting)
• Mallard Manufacturing (gravity flow conveyors)
• Mouse LLC (order-picking carts)
• Panther Industries (automated labeling)
• ProCat (picking systems)
• Pro-Hawk Corp. (bearings, rollers, etc.)
• Ram Mounting Systems (mounting and docking systems)
• Tusk Lift Trucks (heavy-duty lift trucks)
• Wasp Inc. (conveyors)
• Zebra Technologies (bar-code printers)

Most zoolike of all was Kiva Systems' exhibit, which featured a corral enclosing a herd of the company's small orange order-retrieval robots. The metal fence was adorned with signs asking viewers to refrain from feeding the robots as well as amusing explanatory placards that featured photos of each "species" along with its common and "scientific" names, physical characteristics, habitat, and behavior. Visitors learned, for example, that the Common Blue Inventory Pod (itemus gogetemus) spends most of its time in herds. Kiva's marketing staff came up with the idea after seeing attendees at an earlier show hanging on the fence and watching the pods zip around the floor.