IFOY Award 2019 – STILL continues its series of victories

In a comprehensive week of tests at the Hanover Exhibition Grounds in March, distinguished independent experts together with a 29-member international jury assessed all the nominated machines and solutions based on specified criteria and their level of innovation relative to comparable products on the market. The winners in the total of eleven categories, kept secret until the last moment, now received the coveted intralogistics Oscars in Vienna. This year, STILL was able to continue its series of conquests and to come out victorious against the competition. This confirms the status of STILL as a leading intralogistics supplier.

The automated LTX 50 is the best “AGV & Intralogistics Robot”

STILL was victorious in the “AGV & Intralogistics Robot” category with the automated LTX 50 electric towing tractor combined with LiftRunner frames with an automatic loading/unloading function. For the first time, this solution undertakes the fully automatic transport and handling of loads up to 1,200 kg per trailer. When used as a towing train, the trendsetting LTX 50 electric tractor trailer with a total weight of up to 5,000 kg holds its course accurately as it drives through production plants. The towing train can also be used manually for individual processes if required. Goods are transported and loads handled using the LiftRunner Frame with integral roller platform. The automated frame is driven up to a compatible handover station for the load to be transferred. Two sensors ensure that the load, after accurate positioning, is lowered to connect to the handover station. The handover stations obtain energy and information from the intelligent frame, therefore they do not need to be integrated into the company’s IT structure. Thanks to laser navigation, positioning can take place with 1-cm accuracy. After confirming the correct position, the roller tracks are enabled and the loading or unloading process starts. Another sensor ends the conveying process, while at the same time ensuring that complete loading or unloading has taken place. During the innovation checks, the experts praised the solution’s great flexibility.

The system concept of automated load transfer and automatic driving combined in this manner is an innovation that provides additional benefit in production supply in an evolutionary way, while nonetheless continuing to allow the traffic-reducing idea of collective transports. The STILL automated towing train combines automated driving with automatic load handling for the first time, and is thus ideally suitable for supply to and removal from production lines, for example. "What matters is the practice. Innovation must take logistics to a new level. The winner did this impressively. The winner is paving the way for autonomous intralogistics and that is certainly worth an IFOY," said the laudator Arno Reich, Senior Vice President, Deutsche Messe AG.

Since 2013, the IFOY Award has been regarded as an indicator of cost-effectiveness and innovation, and due to its specialist expertise it is considered to be the definitive innovation prize in intralogistics. Winners are chosen annually by an independent jury of leading international specialist journalists, whose decision is based on neutral testing with an extensive series of tests and a specifically defined innovation check. The results of all the finalists are compared with their respective competitor machines. The IFOY Award is under the patronage of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy and is sponsored by the Specialist Trade Association of Materials Handling and Intralogistics in the VDMA (German Association of Machinery and Plant Engineers).

More information about the IFOY award

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