topic Re: Gravity FlowRack item rotation in FlexSim Forum

Gravity FlowRack item rotation

lucas_klein83QQC — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 17:17:21 GMT

[ FlexSim 20.0.0 ]

Dear all,

When using the gravity FlowRack object in the model with the process flow, the item loses its rotation settings when another FlowItem leaves the rack. In the attached example, the rack is fulfilled before the 1500s of simulation, then at the time 1500 a token is responsible to destroy an item of the rack, what happens is that all the others items in the same bay lose the rotation settings that have been set in the Entry Trigger of the rack. Might this be a bug or some kind of problem? Is there any way to solve it?

Thanks in advance

flowrack-item-rotation.fsm

Re: Gravity FlowRack item rotation

benjamin_w2 — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 21:04:15 GMT

Hi @Lucas Klein,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will forward this to our dev team.

Re: Gravity FlowRack item rotation

jon_abbott — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 23:29:13 GMT

Hi @Benjamin W2, I recently encountered this issue as well, and it appears to still be present in FlexSim 21.0.0. Do you know if this issue is planned to be resolved? Thanks for your assistance.

Re: Gravity FlowRack item rotation

jason_lightfoot_adsk — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 12:22:00 GMT

It seems the Storage assumes the z-axis for the item is still pointing up. One thing to note is that hasSpace will account for space in one orientation when the slot is assigned and if you then rotate the item in the slot you will have possibly broken the slot space constraint. (Perhaps we could in the future have the option pass in a Vec3 to hasSpace to tell it how the item will be oriented in the slot, along with an overload that allows the checking of a Vec3 size rather than passing the item - but this is for the developers to mull over)

So at the moment, since z of the item is not up, rack seems to want to rotate the item in the x-axis to depict the fall of the shelf - that's why you see the totes rotated about the vertical axis (which is X due to the combined rotations of the item) by 2.86 degrees when the rack restacks the items, or if you just let the rack accept the items without rotating them on entry.

Given this, the safest method at the moment is to not rotate the items at all but have them configured in the correct orientation using the shape factors of the flow item. If you do need to rotate items, then keep z pointing up.

Attached is the adjusted model in 21.0

flowrack-item-rotation_jl.fsm

Re: Gravity FlowRack item rotation

jon_abbott — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 16:54:12 GMT

Thanks @jason.lightfoot. My issue is a bit different than this - I just posted a fresh question for it here:

https://answers.flexsim.com/questions/95347/preserve-item-orientation-when-placing-into-a-rack.html