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BITO's PROmotion Shuttle promises to transform standard pallet racking into semiautomatic pallet racking

The storage specialist Bito has developed the PROmotion Shuttle, a remote-controlled, battery-powered pallet handling vehicle operating in pallet racking. This vehicle ensures continuous and efficient infeeding and outfeeding of pallets into a lane and keeps track of stock movements.

Improved productivity and efficiency in the intralogistics sector is an imperative. Not only as far as smooth material flow is concerned, but also in view of a reduced floor space occupation, maximum utilisation of storage volume and immediate product availability. To improve on these points, many companies opt for storage facilities featuring lanes to stock more than one load carrier on the same racking level and in the same racking bay.

Compared to standard racking facilities which stock only one load carrier per bay and level, storage in lanes increases the compactness of storage by reducing the space or the warehouse volume required for service aisles. As a rule, storage facilities with lanes are designed as drive-in, pushback or as live storage systems.

In view of a higher storage efficiency, shuttles are ideal for infeeding, relocating and outfeeding load carriers into lanes. For this reason, the shuttle solution has become the solution of choice for servicing fully-automated bin storage facilities.

Recognising the benefit of this idea, Bito has enhanced its static pallet racking system PRO with the PROmotion shuttle solution.

The PROmotion shuttle is a battery-powered, lane-bound vehicle. Routed by remote control, the shuttle feeds pallets in and out of the lane in which it is operating.Moving on purpose-built guide rails, the shuttle "drives" up and down the lane on its own, i.e. without a connected additional carrier vehicle. The shuttle can be relocated into another lane with a conventional fork lift truck. Energy supply is provided by a lithium-ion-battery.

Recharged batteries have a working period of up to12 hours and also operate in deepfreeze environments.

The PROmotion System is generally used in LIFO (last in-first out) handling processes and covers all aspects that contribute to improve efficiency: undisrupted pallet infeeding and outfeeding, stock control and compact storage by continuously monitoring occupied and available storage positions.

Programming is said to easy and flexible, allowing intuitive and safe servicing. Operation is claimed to be fast and silent. Control technology also allows FIFO (first in-first out) operation with two PROmotion shuttles in the same lane.Moreover, the system can be switched from LIFO to FIFO operation as required.