“Robot dog” demonstrates the power of AI in transforming cargo ops at Munich Airport

The 13th May saw researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML demonstrated the initial results of the Digital Testbed Air Cargo (DTAC) research project at Munich Airport in Germany. Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport with around €7 million, the project will run until September 2024 with a focus on how the efficiency and performance of the air freight transport chain can be optimised.

The innovative solutions have been designed to make optimal use of the potential of digital technologies and actively shape the future of air cargo. They included a “robot dog” patrolling autonomously through the warehouse looking for free storage locations, a highly dynamic transport robot that automatically moves pallets to their storage locations and a flexible “segway robot” that places parcels from Euro-pallets onto a conveyor belt.

“This was a convincing demonstration that shows that we are very well prepared for current and future challenges,” said Christian Bernreiter, Bavarian State Minister for Housing, Construction and Transport.

“This is particularly important in the air cargo industry. The industry has to manage the split between shortage of staff on the one hand and high throughput rates on the other. This will only be successful if we make use of all the technological developments available to us for process optimisation.”

He was joined by Munich’s Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Security Officer, Dr. Jan-Henrik Andersson, who underlined his enthusiasm for the research results. “Considering the increasing volume of air cargo and the staff recruitment challenges, digitalisation and robotics will help us make cargo and baggage handling more efficient and jobs in these areas more attractive in the near future.”

During the demonstration at the Bavarian hub, the autonomous and semi autonomous devices were used to either completely take over labour-intensive and repetitive steps at the relevant interfaces in the cargo handling process, or to support staff in physically demanding work.

US manufacturer Boston Dynamics’s “robot dog” named Spot was equipped with a scanner and 4K camera. It patrolled the warehouse autonomously and identified large storage pallets ready for storage and the corresponding storage locations. Meanwhile, an autonomously operated forklift took over the intermediate transport to the automated high-bay warehouse and the omnidirectional, highly dyanimc robot O³dyn developed by Fraunhofer IML transported Euro-pallets to a neighbouring warehouse.

Also developed by Fraunhofer IML was the evoBOT – a dynamically stable system with two gripper arms to place packages from a pallet onto the conveyor belt of an X-ray machine and back onto the pallet after the X-ray process.

Providing his feedback on the presentation, Prof. Michael Henke, Executive Director of Fraunhofer IML summarised: “On the hardware side we are already well advanced. In the future, artificial intelligence will support us in coordinating and controlling the vehicles. It will provide the necessary tools and algorithms with which we can precalculate the routes of the autonomous robots and safely avoid collisions. Ultimately, we will soon have fully autonomous systems that will make the air cargo industry fit for the future.”

Image: Robot dog Spot and forklift truck
© Fraunhofer IML, Vinzenz Neugebauern.