Seegrid adds vision-guided lifting and stacking to product line

Seegrid Corporation, a Pittsburgh-based start-up, has been providing driverless tugs for moving materials from point a to point b. Up until now they have just delivered the skids of material and then a human-operated forklift would lift the skids and place them on the racks

(or the reverse: a human-driven forklift would take from the racks and stack and place the materials so that they could be transported autonomously by a Seegrid tug to where the material was needed).

Now Seegrid is introducing an $80,000 driverless walkie stacker using an off-the-shelf* Class III forklift chassis equipped with Seegrid’s vision-guided autonomous navigation system so that the new device can provide the additional functions to transport: pick, stack and put away*. The tablet-driven walkie stacker GWSL3 is equipped with Seegrid’s vision-guided autonomous navigation system and will be launched at MODEX 2014 in Atlanta this coming March 17-20.

John Hayes, Seegrid VP of Sales and Marketing, said, “With the flexible GWS35 walkie stacker, we have expanded our traditional horizontal transportation line by adding a vehicle that allows for nearly all traditional AGV applications to be both simple and affordable.”

The new walkie stacker will work in conjunction with Seegrid’s new $75,000 vision-guided GT4 tugger. Both the walkie stacker and the tugger can also be leased instead of purchased.

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* There have been rumors that Seegrid has chosen to focus on what it does best: provide vision, scanning and navigation systems and purchase off-the-shelf tugs and forklifts and outfit them with their special equipment and software. It is not known whether the new GWSL3 and GT4 are fully built by Seegrid or not.

Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report, and is also a panel member for Robohub's Robotics by Invitation series.

Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report, and is also a panel member for Robohub's Robotics by Invitation series.