Automated stores and novel type of truck making it possible for

Details Automated stores and novel type of truck making it possible for Automated stores and novel type of truck making it possible for

1993-07-30

1994-12-06

Bucci, David A.

Material or article handling

Plural, static structures for supporting discrete loads and...

Load-underlying members

414284, B65G 104

Patent

active

053704924

DESCRIPTION:

BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improvement to automated installations which make it possible to store and/or to make available various products, which installations, in the rest of the description, will be denoted by the expression "stores". It also deals with a novel type of truck making it possible to provide the displacements of the products inside such stores including a plurality of superimposed levels, which truck could possibly also be used for providing the displacements of products on just one level, for example the ground.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
In numerous industrial fields, there is the problem of having to store products temporarily, this being true both for the company's own needs in terms of its business activity (raw materials, piece parts. .), and for the articles manufactured by the company which are to be stored temporarily before being made available to the user or purchaser.
Very numerous proposals have been made to date for producing automatic stores making it possible not only to limit manual interventions to a minimum, but also to store, in a given volume, the greatest possible number of products.
To date, the most widespread solution for producing automatic stores consists in producing units in which the storage zones are substantially in the form of "columns" of great height, subdivided in the vertical direction into a plurality of superimposed levels constituting rows of racks, or cells whose dimensions are a function of the products to be stored, these "columns" being separated from each other by aisles along which there move units commonly denoted by the expression "transfer loader" or "transverser".
In general, such stores therefore define three axes along which the products are displaced, namely: aisles; aisles;
To date, as stated previously, in order to provide the handling of the products inside such storage units, equipment designers propose automatic or guided machines of the "transfer loader" or "traverser" type, which make it possible to take up and to store pallets or containers in the cells of the columns which constitute the lateral faces of each aisle. Such automatic handling machines all have in common the fact that they run either directly on the ground, or on rails fixed to the ground. They may or may not change aisle. They all include a lift system which makes it possible to bring the member for handling the pallet or the container opposite the cell in question.
Taking account of the fact that the height of the stores becomes greater and greater, these machines become very tall (it being possible for the height to reach several tens of metres), with, in particular, a substantial toll on their cost and on the need to have an increasingly restrictive geometry of, on the one hand, the pallet handler and, on the other hand, the ground.
In order to provide the handling of products on the ground, it has been proposed to produce autonomous trucks which can effect changes in direction, these trucks being either guided by rails or automatically guided and in general being equipped with one or more guidable wheels allowing them to effect turns. Such a design of truck therefore gives rise to the production of displacement circuits which, in the change of direction zones, involve a substantial surface area, given that the truck moves in a curve which consequently, decreases the zone available for actual storage, for a given surface area.
Moreover, such trucks can only be displaced on a single level and they cannot work equally well on several different levels.


SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Now, there has been found, and it is this which forms the subject of the present invention, a simple solution which is economical and easy to implement and which makes it possible to solve the drawbacks of the prior solutions by the fact that it allows the production of storage units which occupy only a minimum surface area on the ground, thus making it possible not to penalise the useful volume of the overall stores.
In ge

REFERENCES:
patent: 3880299 (1975-04-01), Zollinger et al.
patent: 4395181 (1983-07-01), Loomer
patent: 4505630 (1985-03-01), Kaschner et al.
patent: 5033928 (1991-07-01), Suominen
patent: 5069592 (1991-12-01), Galperin
patent: 5135344 (1992-08-01), Kita et al.

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