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Material Handling Headlines

Anyone who has ever loaded a moving van knows how difficult it is to safely stack boxes of different sizes, weights and levels of fragility, all while minimizing the amount of space those cartons take up. Imagine an endless stream of such boxes and a business that lives and dies by the efficiency of their stacking, and you have an idea of the challenge facing warehouses that process large volumes of cargo onto pallets for shipping.

Automation can help, but the complexity of the task makes it difficult to compare the efficiencies of various robotic palletizing approaches. So a consortium of concerned parties is throwing the automated pallet-building challenge to university teams, who can explore the problem in a safe, low-cost virtual world. The Virtual Manufacturing Automation Competition, co-sponsored by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the Georgia Institute of Technology and the electrical engineering association IEEE, aims to create standards for robotic stacking and packing approaches by which automated palletizers can be assessed.

Read the full story at: scientificamerican.com

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