In today's rapidly advancing industrial automation, intelligent loading remains a bottleneck for many manufacturing enterprises. Manual loading suffers from low efficiency, high injury rates, and significant environmental pressures, creating an urgent need for technological innovation. In 2024, ESTUN and its partners embarked on an industry milestone project—the development and testing of a full-process intelligent loading system. After months of sustained effort, the project successfully completed testing, marking the comprehensive application of domestic robots in intelligent loading scenarios.

Targeting Industry Pain Points,  jointly tackling challenges

According to statistics, nearly 2,000 work-related injuries occur annually during loading processes nationwide, with an average efficiency loss of approximately 187,000 tons per loading line per year. Industries such as cement, fertilizers, and feed are particularly heavily penalized for environmental violations. To address these long-standing challenges, ESTUN and its partners leveraged years of industry experience to jointly develop an intelligent loading system aimed at achieving "reduced manpower, higher efficiency, and precision" in loading operations through technological means.

The partner deeply understood front-line customer needs, while ESTUN contributed its technical expertise in robot control, visual recognition, and system integration. Together, they formed a joint project team stationed at the customer site, collaborating closely on key aspects such as system design, installation, and debugging.

Technological Breakthroughs Achieving Multiple "Firsts"

The project's greatest challenge was enabling robots to efficiently collaborate with 3D lidar for accurate recognition of different vehicles and autonomous stacking planning via automatic loading software. The wide variety of vehicle models, differing carriage sizes, and complex stacking methods placed extremely high demands on algorithm robustness and robot trajectory planning.

The project team adopted ESTUN's self-developed palletizing robots, which used 3D point cloud algorithms to parse vehicle types and characteristic information, allowing the loading software to adaptively plan stacking patterns. This achieved accurate identification and adaptive grasping of different vehicle types and goods. By debugging lidar parameters, optimizing recognition models, and calibrating positioning accuracy, the team ultimately enabled robots to stably recognize and efficiently load multiple types of trucks in complex environments.

This also marks the first time domestic robots have achieved a complete closed-loop application in intelligent loading scenarios, covering the entire process from vehicle recognition and position calculation to robot motion control and loading technology, setting a new technical benchmark for the industry.

Collaborative Creation, Earning High Customer Recognition

After successful testing, the customer sent a letter of appreciation specifically noting: "Leveraging solid professional knowledge and extensive practical experience, ESTUN achieved key breakthroughs in robot coordination with radar recognition and vehicle adaptation... significantly improving loading efficiency and accuracy, meeting the project's expected goals".

This achievement not only verified the feasibility of the technical route but also laid a solid foundation for subsequent batch applications. The entire system includes functional modules such as intelligent detection, loading process software, and a big data visual management platform, supporting multi-lane operation monitoring, real-time equipment status viewing, and digital twin animation display, significantly enhancing the transparency and controllability of the loading process.

Creating a New Industry Benchmark, Driving Domestic Intelligent Upgrade

The project solution is soon to be officially launched for market operation. The technical data and experience accumulated by ESTUN and its partners have already provided valuable insights for the development of domestic intelligent loading systems. Through such in-depth collaboration, ESTUN and its partners have not only strengthened their technical capabilities and market response speed but also jointly established a new intelligent loading paradigm replicable across multiple industries. In the future, both parties will continue to deepen cooperation, launching highly adaptable solutions for more complex scenarios, persistently supporting the automation and intelligent transformation of Chinese manufacturing.