Norway prime minister officially opens AutoStore Innovation Hub

AutoStore, the leading robotic technology company, has created a pioneering test facility that can allow for faster fitting of automated systems for its clients to keep up with order demand.

Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg (pictured below cutting ribbon), was said to be “deeply impressed” by AutoStore’s success when she officially opened the new test center and had it demonstrated.

As she officially opened the Innovation Hub, Solberg said: “AutoStore is a guiding star showing the way towards growth for the Norwegian private sector.”

Earlier this year, the Prime Minister used AutoStore as an example when she talked about the need for jobs in privately owned companies in Norway in her speech to the Conservative Party’s National Convention.

She said, humorously: “I was first introduced to AutoStore back in 2018 when visiting one of their facilities in Japan and remember thinking: If we can sell robots from Vindafjord to Japan, then everything is possible in Norway.”

Karl Johan Lier (above), CEO of AutoStore, said he was proud to welcome the prime minister to Karmøy.

He said: “The government stresses the importance in creating more profitable jobs in the private sector and AutoStore aims to deliver on this by continuously develop the offering to our customers globally.

“At the AutoStore Innovation Hub we combine the excellent know-how from our competent team with the newest technology, making it possible to constantly test and develop new solutions.”

The Innovation Hub is fitted with a combination of robotic technology and infrastructure for supply chain and retail facilities that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The Hub will be able to test the solutions that are developed for global retailers and their store and warehouse facilities.

The facility’s environment can also be adjusted to allow the robots to be tested in both hot and cold conditions, analyzing how the oxygen level changes when goods are stacked within storage systems.

The Hub also simulates earthquakes to see how warehouse and store technology would respond to potentially harmful situations, as well as a number of other functions.

Lier said: “We identified the need to test solutions under a number of different situations, but we could not set up a test center for cold environments, one for heat, and at the same time one for a modern store solution, one for medical storage and so on.

“Therefore, we set up a center where we could simulate different situations and needs. This agile approach offers our clients competitive market advantage, and places them at the heart of new innovations within the sector that can propel them forwards.”