BREATHES THERE A MAN with soul so dead he’s never wanted to drive a forklift? Assuming not, this was the place that dreams are made of, a hall the size of an air terminal filled with the newest in things that move other things–forklifts, pallet stackers, industrial robots, conveyor systems, automatic guided vehicles, storage and retrieval systems, cranes, hoists, lifts and monorails.
But this show wasn’t for those of us wanting to get in touch with our inner Mike Mulligan. It was for all the guys who warehouse products, who move them from place to place, who understand what the words “sortation,” “throughput” and “order picking” mean. In short, a show devoted to an activity that goes shamefully unsung, yet is as vital to the world economy as oil: schlepping.
Glamorous schlepping, though. Here were machines so sexy as to rival anything at next week’s Auto Show. A forklift that runs sideways so it can go through doorways with extra-wide loads, like 20-foot tubes. A robot arm that loads an eye-popping 220 cartons a minute. And something seemingly plucked from the surface of Mars: a remote-controlled “intelligent cart” that goes where no man has gone before, i.e. the bowels of an unstaffed “deep-lane storage structure” (don’t know what that is exactly but it sure sounds forbidding) to shelve and retrieve heavy palettes. Not to mention an automated, laser-fitted gizmo that replaces batteries in automated vehicles that run out of juice in deep-lane storage structures.
Despite all the high tech, though, the most popular exhibit, the one that had delegates lining up to try it, was the MouseCart, a device that goes 4-10 m.p.h., carries hundreds of pounds of cargo and never needs fuel. How, you ask? A person runs it by pushing along on a rear-mounted scooter.
