Awards for the “BEST PRODUCT” at LogiMAT Have Been Announced

The decision on this year’s “BEST PRODUCT” award winners has been made. From more than 120 submissions, the independent jury of scientists and journalists selected three innovative products that particularly meet the competitive criteria of productivity enhancement, cost savings, and streamlining.

(Stuttgart) The award was presented yesterday on the first day of the trade fair during the festive opening ceremony in the LogiMAT Arena to the company representatives of the awarded products. The laudation was given by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Johannes Fottner, Chair of the Chair of Materials Handling, Material Flow, Logistics at the Technical University of Munich.

In the category “Order Picking, Conveying, Lifting, Storage Technology”AeroBot by the Austrian KNAPP AG

The innovative, flexibly scalable AeroBot system is an intelligent system design for robot-operated compact storage and will celebrate its premiere at LogiMAT 2025. The AeroBots represent a new generation of warehouse robots that complement the technology company’s offerings in the field of automated storage systems. An innovative feature of the Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) is the Friction Drive technology. Supported by modern Lidar technology, the robots can move in three dimensions. This is unique in the industry so far. In addition, the new development particularly meets the current market demands for high flexibility and scalability in warehouse design. The AeroBots move under the shelving system as well as vertically along the shelves to the designated storage location. There, a small satellite bot, which is located directly on the AeroBot, takes over the loading and unloading of the system containers, known as Aeroboxes, stored up to four times deep, with a weight of up to 35 kilograms. Another advantage: The system containers can accommodate different loading aids. This allows various types of goods to be stored together in one system. The compact storage allows for a construction height of up to 12 meters with different shelf heights in one system and offers the highest possible storage density. Process control and the orchestration of the AeroBots and SatBots, as well as the integration of the mechanical components into overarching software systems, is handled by KNAPP’s KiSoft software.

In the category “Identification, Packaging and Loading Technology, Load Securing” KATHREIN Solutions GmbH

The latest, fourth generation of RAIN RFID readers from KATHREIN Solutions, which will be presented at LogiMAT 2025, features numerous innovations that enable new process-optimized logistical applications. The new reader generation has two device variants: an ARU (Antenna Reader Unit with integrated antenna and 3 outputs for external antennas) and an RRU (Reader Unit with 4 outputs for external antennas). The integrated antenna in the ARU Gen4 is a circularly polarized “Phased-array” antenna system that has three scalable antenna beams. Two of these beams are wide and oriented left and right, while the third beam is narrow and oriented straight ahead. With this technology, data can be reliably captured even in complex environments. Positioned on a forklift, the device can safely and accurately read all transponders on a pallet. This allows for real-time inventory of the transponders attached to a pallet even while in motion – and reported to the ERP system via the integrated wireless connections (WLAN and/or 5G) of the KATHREIN Gen4 reader. When forklifts load or unload pallets onto or from a truck, or when pallets change their position in the warehouse, the RFID-tagged products are automatically read and their movement registered. With real-time networking, time- and cost-intensive capture processes are eliminated. Additional capture of transponders through RFID gates is no longer necessary. Moreover, power consumption has been reduced by 40 percent, and the footprint of raw materials has been lowered by 50 percent. Thus, the Gen4 readers of the fourth generation not only incur lower operating costs but also support sustainability efforts.

With the award in the category “Software, Communication, IT” PSIwms AI by PSI Software SE | Business Unit Logistics

Automation and process optimization characterize the solution offering of PSIwms AI. With the AI platform, PSI provides customers with a completely new tool for analyzing, planning, and optimizing logistics processes in the warehouse. The AI solution analyzes thousands of warehouse operation scenarios hourly and provides optimization recommendations. The basis is a digital twin of the real warehouse that generates data used for training machine learning models (algorithms). This virtual test warehouse is connected to the WMS and represents the real warehouse by reflecting all relevant processes and features. In this way, it can be tested non-invasively how the manifestation of the most important KPIs changes with adjustments in the warehouse. In a reference project, the platform analyzed the relevant processes of a distribution center with 750,000 storage locations and more than 700 employees. As a result, the processes were optimized to such an extent that picking routes were shortened by about 31 percent and the efficiency of the entire picking process increased by about 23 percent. The AI platform is directly connected to the Warehouse Management System PSIwms via an interface. This allows changes in the physical warehouse to be automatically and in real time transferred to a digital twin and considered in the analysis. As a unique feature, changes in the WMS process or a reconfiguration of the system are also automatically incorporated into the AI platform. The AI platform will be demonstrated in Stuttgart through a showcase.

Photos: © LogiMAT