Vertical Lift Module Product

Overview

A vertical lift module is an enclosed storage tower that brings goods to the operator instead of sending the operator into an aisle. Trays of stored items sit in two racks, one at the front and one at the rear of a tall steel column; an extractor in the middle lifts the requested tray and presents it at an access bay at a comfortable working height. Because the machine packs trays by their measured height rather than fixed shelf pitches, it recovers the dead air above short loads and stores far more in the same floor area than shelving. A single column can rise to 16 m and present any of dozens of trays in seconds.

The structure is the Column Enclosure, a bolted steel column clad in panels. Inside, two banks of Tray Rack hold the Storage Tray population, and the Extractor Platform runs up the center between them. Operators interact only at the Access Bay, guided by the Operator HMI.

How it works

Every Storage Tray is a shallow steel pan with pick-up lips. Trays are not assigned fixed homes; when a tray is returned, the Inventory Sensors profile its load height with a light bar and the controller assigns it the shallowest free slot on a Tray Rack, so storage stays dense.

Retrieval is the job of the Extractor Platform. A counterweighted lift platform runs on vertical guide rails, raised by a geared Lift Drive Motor through belts, with a Lift Ball Screw setting height to the millimetre. Riding on the platform, the Tray Shuttle extends hooked gripper fingers driven by a belt to pull a tray off its rack onto the platform, and to push it back into any free location on either rack.

The platform delivers the tray to the Access Bay, where it is presented on a shelf at pick height behind a Light Curtain that halts the extractor if the operator reaches in during motion. The whole sequence is run by the Machine Controller: a SoC tracks where every item lives and which order line is being picked, while an MCU sequences the lift and shuttle axes and relays switch the drives.