For our final look back at Automate, let’s run through some of the many innovations which Zebra Technologies presented at the immensely successful trade show.
While at their booth, we first spoke to Laurie Partington, Portfolio Marketing Manager at Zebra. She walked us through the Connected Factory by Zebra, labelling it as one of their big focuses for the trade show.
Laurie revealed the diversity of Zebra’s solutions:
“Zebra brings together a lot of different automation tools to the factory. A lot of people know us for printers and scanners, but we’re investing heavily in industrial automation. At Automate, our focus is on our machine vision technology and our autonomous mobile robots.”
The company is launching an array of technology in the robotics division, including a symmetry solution. Zebra’s Eric Harty gave us an overview of their robotics demonstration:
“Zebra Symmetry Fulfilment is the solution we have. The picker works with a team of four robots. These robots are going to position themselves in front of the picker, which moves between the robots. It’s fantastic for warehousing and manufacturing, and the economics work well too.”
Zebra split their demonstration of robotics automation into two solution spaces; fulfilment and material movement. Eric explains, “In the fulfilment operation, we’re getting and picking. The material movement focuses on manufacturing, such as line-side delivery in warehouses like post-pick transport.”
They also presented their dock door solution, which can quickly read barcodes without the need for human involvement. Laurie explained, “It’s a simplistic solution, but is packaged all together with the software, cameras and the vision controller.”
Laurie then showed us their 3D dimensioning solution, which detects the height, width and length of an object and can scan barcodes at the same time. She explained that the user sets an item on the scale, which immediately weighs the object to determine the price of shipping and the size of the box required. It can also detect issues with the barcode.
