Warehouse Automation and Sensors

How can you automate your warehouses? Should you automate your manufacturing? This article is an extension of our Hokuyo and Yujin post, and goes into more depth about warehouse automation.

Why Automate Warehouses?

Let's address the elephant in the room. Are robots going to steal human jobs? No. In fact, many manufacturing and warehouse managers are "employing" robots to improve human employee retention.

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UNDERSTANDING LIDAR

Humans are arguably the most dominant creatures on Earth in no small part due to our amazing senses. In particular, sight and our visual perception ability are key to our understanding of the world around us. And for centuries, humans have been inventing tools to help them see more of the world around them. Beyond simply seeing the world, we have pushed to add precision to our sight by making systems to measure distances and ranges to the objects around us.

How to Choose the Right Sensor Technology

Advances in LiDAR and sensor technology are driving size and cost of sensors down rapidly, while improving performance dramatically.
The Acroname team has put together this short guide to help make some sense of the technologies available today:

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Announcing Brand New Lightware Laser Sensors

The LW20, with an IP67 enclosure, and the open-frame SF20 are now available for pre-order in our webstore.  

Hokuyo Factory Reset Procedure

A few customers have mentioned that, when trying to reset the Hokuyo UST-10LX or UST-20LX sensors to the factory default IP address, the reset procedure found in the product specification may not reset the IP address properly.

Per the UST-20LX Product Specification 2014.6.12, the process to reset the sensor's IP address to factory default value is shown in Section 10 as follows: 

Below is a handy chart comparing the LightWare sensors that Acroname stocks.  

If you are interested in a model not listed here, just let us know - we can order anything in the LightWare catalog for you.