Robotic technology company AutoStore has unveiled a new facility dedicated to testing and replicating diverse in-store and warehouse environments.
Located in Karmøy, Norway, the AutoStore Innovation Hub has been designed to allow for faster fitting of automated systems for the company’s clients in order to keep up with order demand.
Built in seven months, the facility is fitted with a combination of robotic technology and infrastructure for supply-chain and retail facilities. It can test solutions developed for global retailers and their store and warehouse facilities.
The facility’s environment can also be adjusted to allow the robots to be tested in both hot and cold conditions, analysing how oxygen level change when goods are stacked within storage systems.
It also simulates earthquakes to see how warehouse and store technology would respond to potentially harmful situations, as well as a number of other functions.
Karl Johan Lier, CEO of AutoStore, said: “We identified the need to test solutions under a number of different situations, but we could not set up a test centre for cold environments, one for heat, and at the same time one for a modern store solution, one for medical storage and so on.
“Therefore, we set up a centre where we could simulate different situations and needs. This agile approach offers our clients a competitive market advantage, and places them at the heart of new innovations within the sector that can propel them forwards.”
