What are Truck Unloading Robots?

Truck unloading robots are an exciting new development in the arena of warehouse automation. There are two basic types of trucks that need unloading in warehouse operations. Trucks or trailers that are floor loaded and simply include a stack of boxes loaded in the vehicle, and trailers that have palletized loads on them.

Robotic truck unloading vendors are focused on one or the other. Much of the goods that come into North America are manufactured offshore and sent to the floor loaded on shipping containers. Extracting these items from the trailer is time consuming and laborious. For this reason, several vendors have focused on solving this problem with automation. Interestingly, such systems do not require integration to other systems. You can point to automation at a trailer and a stream of boxes come out on an extendable conveyor.

When a robot in a trailer drops a box, how the system recovers itself is important. We saw boxes drop at both the Pickle Robot and Boston Dynamics booths at Promat23 and in both cases the robot recognized the dropped box and successfully picked it up off the floor and placed it on the takeaway conveyor without human interaction.

Unloading palletize loads off a truck or trailer presents an entirely different set of challenges. Pallets are larger and heavier. The unloading can be done faster, and the vehicle doing the unloading can potentially take the pallet to differing destinations based on need.

So far robotic vendors tend to be focused on trailer unloading. Loading is thought to be a harder problem to solve, and we will cover that once technical momentum is made.