Industrial plant model

May 2011: Starting from the color sorter arm, I built this LEGO industrial plant, realizing a desktop-scale model of an automatic warehouse. It features the 4DOF palletizing manipulator robot, and an automatic guided vehicle that moves products (colored balls) from the picking stations to the dropping stations, implemented as gravity racks. The development took two months full time.

Your company can use such LEGO industrial model to attract people to your fair booth, for simulation and training purposes.

CONTACT ME

The industrial plant model was built for the Elettric80 company, to be featured at the Interpack Fair in Dusseldorf in May 2011. It was an exceptional eye-catcher, attracting hundreds of people, much more than the real machines. The system worked for 7 days, 10 hours per day, proving to be very robust. I stressed LEGO hardware to its limits, reducing wheels and tyres to dust, literally.

Some random comments by visitors:

Dude, that’s crazy!

OMG, that’s sick! Are those LEGOs?!?

This is worth the whole fair”

That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen today!

NXTwarehouse_before — Me after 4 hours since the beginning of the fair...

NXTwarehouse_after — ...and after 70 hours of fair. The LEGO system was still up and running.

The forklift navigates following on the edge of the dark line, and parks with great precision on the colored spots, that serve as simple topologic landmarks.

This forklift is a LEGO automatic guided vehicle that works for real

The robot arm uses standard RC servos instead of NXT motors, because they allow more precise movement control, ease of assembly, smaller dimensions. The servos are driven using the MINDSENSORS NXTservo interface. I modelled the missing LDRAW parts for the Mindsensors NXT servo mounts. You can find the other Mindsensors servo parts in this Philo’s webpage.