Raymond, Seegrid team up on automated lift trucks

The Raymond Corp. today showed a prototype automated lift truck that uses Seegrid's vision-guided technology to move through a warehouse. The vehicle can operate either man-aboard or without a driver, changing from one mode to another in less than a second by the flip of a switch. The automated truck is designed to reduce labor costs by eliminating the need for people to make repetitive "milk-run" type deliveries within a facility, leaving them free to concentrate on more complex tasks.

When a driver operates a truck equipped with the vision-guided technology, the truck learns both the path it must follow and the individual steps of the task it will perform, such as carrying a pallet between locations in a warehouse, sounding a horn at intersections, and waiting at an unloading point. No lasers, tapes, or wires are required. Each vehicle can learn up to 15 miles of routes in any configuration. After a truck learns the route, no driver is required.

Raymond expects to have the automated trucks available for sale this summer.