How High-Level Reach Truck AGVs Solved a Home Furnishings Warehouse Challenge

Home furnishings logistics rarely fits a standard automation template. Oversized, fragile, and irregularly packaged goods make many off-the-shelf AGV systems impractical. When a globally recognized home furnishings brand needed to automate its South China distribution center, BlueSword had to design around constraints most warehouse automation projects never encounter.

A Warehouse With Non-Standard Everything

Home furnishings logistics is defined by variability: oversized, overweight, and irregularly shaped goods move through the same facility, often on non-standard packaging. Combined with high operational intensity and low storage density, these conditions make warehouse automation harder to standardize than in most other industries. Rising land and labor costs have made this a pressing problem across the sector.

BlueSword partnered with the brand on its South China CP warehouse, a facility that had relied entirely on manual forklift operations, particularly for high-bay storage and retrieval. The brand's goal was to build its first fully automated terminal warehouse, with this project serving as the pilot for that broader supply chain strategy. 

Problems That Ruled Out Standard Equipment

The project's pallets were made of a fragile paper-based material with a fork pocket height of just 45mm, well under the standard 110mm, which meant the AGV needed far tighter fork positioning accuracy than usual. Pallet types and fork pocket dimensions also varied across the facility, requiring the system to recognize each type and adjust automatically. Floor-stacked goods came in mixed sizes and multiple layers, ruling out simple point-based picking. And the warehouse's high-bay racking included wooden support beams that required precise alignment to avoid damage during storage.

The Solution: A Purpose-Built Reach Truck AGV

BlueSword's engineering team developed a high-level reach truck AGV  specifically for this environment. A 3D vision detection system paired with real-time algorithms identifies each pallet's spatial position and adjusts fork alignment automatically, correcting for deviation as it picks. If a pallet is deformed or tilted beyond a safe threshold, the system stops and triggers an alarm rather than proceeding.

Navigation relies on a hybrid system built around laser SLAM, which requires minimal environmental modification and supports real-time map updates — useful in a warehouse where conditions change frequently. It holds positioning accuracy of ±5mm. In floor-stacking zones, a 3D vision system detects how many layers are stacked and searches by area rather than by fixed point, while also identifying open space for storage on its own.

For the pallet handling itself, the AGV reaches a lifting height of 11.45 meters and handles loads up to 2 tons, integrating driving, steering, fork lifting, mast movement, and tilt control in one unit — deployed without any civil construction or facility modification. A layered safety system, including 360° laser obstacle avoidance, fork collision protection, and pallet anti-drag detection, supports safe operation at height.

Results That Extend Beyond One Warehouse

After close to 10,000 test cycles, the system passed acceptance in 2021 and fully replaced manual forklift handling for high-bay storage and retrieval, cutting labor costs while shortening delivery times. Removing forklifts from high-bay operations also eliminated a significant source of workplace risk. The project was later recognized as a National Excellent Case in Home Furnishings Logistics for 2021, and it now serves as the brand's reference model for automating future distribution centers globally. 

As one of the few Chinese logistics automation companies with in-house hardware and software R&D, BlueSword continues to build customized solutions for industries where standard automation falls short — from AGV AMR-driven board-material handling on factory floors to integrated storage systems for retail distribution centers.