Armor-Iimak has brought a new batch of Alstef Group automated guided vehicles into service at its production site in La Chevrolière, in France’s Loire-Atlantique region. The plant, which makes thermal transfer ribbons, has run three GT16 tri-directional AGVs for the past few months. They work the narrow aisles, and they sit alongside a fleet the manufacturer has been building for years.
A Fleet That Keeps Growing
These three units join ten Alstef pallet-transfer AGVs that have operated on the site since 2015. So this is less a first step than the deepening of a system Armor-Iimak already trusts. The GT16 stores pallets up to eight metres high and moves at 2.5 metres per second. Each vehicle carries a load-verification system that checks what it is handling before it moves.
Why Narrow Aisles Matter
Tri-directional trucks earn their keep in tight warehouses. They let operators pack storage lanes closer together while still reaching high racking, which means more pallet positions in the same footprint. For a plant modernising an installation that has been automated for a decade, that density counts. Alstef frames the deployment as part of a broader push to modernise and extend the life of Armor-Iimak’s automated logistics setup, with the new vehicles orchestrating pallet flows between production and storage zones.
Ten years in, Armor-Iimak is doubling down rather than ripping out. Whether the next expansion leans further into automation, or into the software that coordinates it, is the more interesting question.
