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US 5,135,344 AGranted
Automatic storage/retrieval apparatus for articles
AssigneeKabushikkaisha Itoki Kosakusho
InventorsHiroshi Kita, Shigeki Tsuchida, Tetsuji Hamada
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Abstract
Inner pickers (6) are provided for respective stages of racks (4) of storage areas (2, 3) to be movable on rails (7). Operations of the inner pickers (6) are independently controlled in the respective rack stages by optical communication through optical communication units (9).
Claims5
An automatic storage/retrieval apparatus for articles, comprising:
- a storage area provided with a plurality of racks, each rack comprising a plurality of vertically arranged rack stages, only a single vertical row of rack stages within said plurality of racks being designated as a charging/delivery rack group;
- a plurality of pickers to be horizontally movable only at a single level provided along opening sides of the racks for access to respective rack stages of said storage area to insert/extract articles into/from said stages from/to said charging/delivery rack group;
- a plurality of first optical communication units provided to respectively face the pickers;
- second optical communication units provided on respective ones of said pickers to perform optical communication with corresponding ones of said first optical communication units;
- picker control means for performing transfer of optical signals between said first and second optical communication units to independently control said pickers;
- and
- stationary transferring means operating independently of the operation of said pickers to transfer articles to an exterior, wherein said charging/delivery rack group constitutes said stationary transferring means.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.