" As well as" instead of "either - or"

"All of these products come from our own development and production, as do the control and navigation systems," explains Kurt Ammerstorfer, Division Manager Sales, Product Management and Marketing at DS Automotion. "This is the only way we can master the different technologies and meet the diverse requirements of the individual applications with rapid innovation processes."

The AGV/AMRs from Linz score with robustness and endurance for tough everyday industrial use as well as with tested and certified functions for uncompromising personal and machine safety. Thanks to a high degree of standardization, DS Automotion's forklift trucks are also competitive with subsequently automated series trucks in terms of acquisition costs.

Designed as a smart modular system, the underride vehicles are available with conventional drive, with the ability to turn on the stand or in fully surface-mobile versions, the forklifts with different lifting heights, fork widths and lengths, and a whole catalog of attachments for load handling.

They can operate with different battery types and charging concepts and can handle both physical or virtual lane guidance with all known technologies as well as free navigation with all common navigation and localization methods. Within just one vehicle, they can also use these in combination, for example to supplement contour-based navigation for transport with dead reckoning with magnetic points for precise load transfer.

The intelligence behind DS Automation's flexible solutions, the NAVIOS master controller, is not just a fleet management system. As a fully-fledged intralogistics system, it can independently create the transport orders from demand data and control the entire automated material flow.

In addition, NAVIOS controls the interaction with other traffic participants, such as manned forklifts, elevators, rolling or fire protection gates. NAVIOS also enables the seamless connection of stationary conveyor technology or warehouse technology in order to expand these into holistic logistics solutions by combining them with AGV solutions. This gives their operators completely new dimensions of flexibility. Therefore, it was a logical step for SSI Schaefer to fully integrate DS Automotion, the expert in the field of AGVs and AMRs with a wide range of solutions, into the company family.

For communication with the AGVs or AMRs, NAVIOS uses the standardized, open universal interface VDA-5050, which enables vehicles from other manufacturers to be integrated into the facility, for example if a special vehicle is required within the fleet for certain tasks.

"An AGV for assembling truck cabs naturally looks different from one for transporting sheet metal coils," says Kurt Ammerstorfer. "Even today, our engineers in Linz sometimes design completely task-specific vehicles" Due to this competence, even exotic transport tasks do not cause DS Automotion any embarrassment when it comes to providing the right vehicle.