At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the three companies are showcasing how clients can both define ideal set-ups for new warehouses and continuously enhance existing facilities with Mega, an NVIDIA Omniverse blueprint for large-scale industrial digital twins. This includes a digital twin powered by physical AI – AI models that embody principles and qualities of the physical world – to improve the performance of intelligent warehouses that operate with automated forklifts, smart cameras and the latest automation and robotics solutions.
“At KION, we leverage AI-driven solutions as an integral part of our strategy to optimize our customers’ supply chains and increase their productivity,” said Rob Smith, CEO of KION GROUP AG. “With NVIDIA’s AI leadership and Accenture’s expertise in digital technologies, we are reinventing warehouse automation. Bringing these strong partners together, we are creating a vision for future warehouses that are part of a smart agile system, evolve with the world around them, and can handle nearly any supply chain challenge. This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and pushing the boundaries of industrial automation to usher in a new era of supply chain efficiency.”
Taking Advantage of Digital Twins to Plan Warehouses and Train Robots
Today’s warehouses and fulfillment centers combine workers, autonomous vehicles, and fully automated systems. Managing these complex environments requires a delicate balance of precision and adaptability—a challenge compounded by fluctuating demand and shifting inventory needs.
Using NVIDIA Omniverse and Mega, KION will be able to provide digital twins of warehouses that allows facility operators to design the most efficient and safe warehouse configuration without interrupting operations for testing. This includes optimizing the number of robots, workers, and automation equipment. The digital twin provides a testing ground for all aspects of warehouse operations, including facility layouts, the behavior of robot fleets, and the optimal number of workers and intelligent vehicles.
The digital twin doesn’t stop at simulating and testing configurations. It also trains the warehouse robots to handle changing conditions such as demand, inventory fluctuation and layout changes in the best possible way. Integrated with KION’s warehouse management software, the digital twin assigns tasks like moving goods from buffer zones to storage locations to virtual robots. Powered by advanced AI, the virtual robots plan, execute, and refine these tasks in a continuous loop, simulating and ultimately optimizing real-world operations with infinite scenarios. For the CES showcase, Accenture developed an interactive application that tracks how digital robot fleet and facility planning and testing enhances warehouse key performance indicators, such as throughput, task completion time, safety incidents and error rates.
As a next step, the partners are working to integrate the digital twin with a fine-tuned vision language model to capture real time insights from warehouses, reducing the risk of bottlenecks, accidents and other unforeseen events, pairing cameras, robots and NVIDIA NIM, a set of services for deployment of foundation models to edge devices in the warehouse.
In essence, the warehouse of the future will create an environment where both human workers and machines can collaborate seamlessly and safely. It predicts, visualizes and adopts to potential issues and generates data-driven insights for operators. This ultimately helps clients design warehouses that are not only more efficient but also more resilient.
