Bastian Solutions Launches Robot Warehouse Picker with Parts Developed Via Additive Manufacturing

Bastian Solutions, a Toyota Advanced Logistics company, has announced the Bastian Solutions Shuttle System, a robotic materials handler with efficiency and flexibility made possible with parts designed and built through additive manufacturing. The additive parts of the robotic Shuttle System—including the fingers, joints and elbow—are made with polymers, giving the robotic materials handler more dexterity and efficiency, as the lightweight material allows for a smaller motor and requires less power to execute its daily operations than with its previous metallic parts.

Bastian Solutions worked with Fast Radius to fully implement additive design and manufacturing into the Shuttle System. Forty-five percent of the final build-of-material (BOM) for the arm of the Bastian Solutions Shuttle System robotic picker will be produced using additive manufacturing. The parts are manufactured using HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printers and Carbon printers.

“The additive manufacturing process will enable us to customize each robot picker to fit a customer’s particular warehouse environment,” says Ron Daggett, VP of technology and R&D, Bastian Solutions.

“The nature of additive manufacturing enabled us to create and test over a thousand prototype parts for Bastian Solutions in under 20 months until we arrived at just the right ones for this piece of equipment,” says Lou Rassey, CEO, Fast Radius.

A portion of the Bastian Solutions Shuttle System’s parts and prototypes, including the durable polymer joints that give the robotic arm its power and dexterity, were made with HP 3D printers using Multi Jet Fusion industrial-grade technology. Additional parts, including the proprietary fingers/gripper for the robotic arm were developed using Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) technology and materials, notably EPU 40.