Ramen for your Autonomous Robot Deployment

Frito-Lay leverages Ramen’s Wireless Networking Service to support their AGV and AMR systems

Frito-Lay is the largest snack mix manufacturer in USA. Historically, Frito-Lay produces approximately 600 million pounds of snacks in the six weeks leading up to the game –and more than 67 million pounds of snacks the week of Super Bowl. Shipping snacks at this scale requires unprecedented precision in logistics and a heavy investment in automation. Frito-Lay has been a leader in deploying advanced robotics and is a heavy user of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Automated Mobile Robots (AMRs). To maintain their leadership position in their industry and they continually evaluate new technologies. They have partnered with Ramen Inc, to develop their next gen architecture for deployment of AGVs. Each Frito-Lay AGV connects to a Ramen Machine Gateway (RMG) that automatically picks the write networking technology for each category of data and enterprise application. The Ramen provided network also enables the Frito-Lay operations team to rapidly modify their AGV routes to account for changes in their product mix.

Executive Summary

Frito-Lay, an industry leader in snack foods, is continually evaluating new technology to improve their product quality and operational efficiency. As they scale up their use of AGVs and AMRs, they decided they needed a dedicated wireless network to support the AGV/AMR deployment. After a rigorous evaluation of a variety of different vendors and technologies, they chose to partner with Ramen. Ramen provides a Ramen Machine Gateway (RMG) that attaches to each AGV/AMR and sets up a wireless network which covers all areas where the AGVs/AMRs will operate. The RMG acts as a smart gateway that can route data over Ethernet, WiFi, Cellular or mm-wave to best meet the reliability, bandwidth and data needs of the specific application.

Highlights

In partnering with Ramen, Frito-Lay was able to upgrade reliability of the wireless connectivity in their distribution center and AGV/AMR down time by 30%. The partnership with Ramen allowed them to create a dedicated the wireless network for supporting their AGVs/AMRs at a cost that was 70% lower than their prior wireless network cost.

Challenge

As Frito-Lay began to scale up their deployment of AGVs and AMRs, it became clear to them that these would need an ultra-reliable network dedicated to AGV/AMR operation. Building this network without disrupting their existing WiFi network that was operationally critical for other applications posed a challenge. Coordination between the existing WiFi network and the new network for AGVs/AMRs was going to be a technical challenge.

Solution

For Frito-Lay, Ramen deployed a private LTE network operating in the CBRS band. Using the CBRS band allowed complete independence from the WiFi bands and better handling of handover due to the more sophisticated approach to handovers taken by the 3GPP standards relative to the IEEE802.11 standards. To reduce installation costs, Ramen used mm-wave radios to back haul some of the APs that were hard to wire up to existing IDFs.

The greater control over the handover process provided by the 3GPP based LTE solution will enable increases in AGV/AMR speeds in the future.

Impact

By partnering with Ramen, Frito-Lay was able to get an independent network for their AGVs/AMRs that help reduce downtime of these expensive resources and they were able to do this with an investment that was paid off from operational savings in less than 8 months.

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