Topic: Robotics

Instead of purchasing large fixed capital, retailers find relief in minimizing both infrastructure changes and other financial burden by choosing an intelligent robot solution.

In this year’s annual survey, the disruption of the past year certainly influenced some short-term trends, but respondents are optimistic going forward. Results reflect more than a bump in the road, however. Companies are deeply concerned about issues like labor availability, workload planning and tighter cycle times, prompting interest in technology and software solutions, better metrics and further automation.

Locus Robotics, a leader in autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses, this week announced $150 million in Series E funding, led by Tiger Global Management and BOND. The round builds on support from existing investors including Scale Venture Partners and Prologis Ventures, the venture capital arm of Prologis, a global leader in logistics real estate.

A major jump in e-commerce sales, ongoing supply chain disruptions, and the need for social distancing all push more companies to add robotics to their technology stables.

Though robotic industrial trucks are still a small slice of the market, expectations are growing for them as operations seek to speed up their processes while lessening the struggle of trying to find enough operators.

The companies said that this collaboration will augment warehouse productivity, order pick accuracy, and workplace ergonomics and safety.

NorthShore Care Supply is using AMRs to automate pick-to-cart processes, while still using the cart.

Robotics has gained rapid traction in the last few years of economic growth and low unemployment, as companies began implementing as a means of increasing productivity and coping with the labor crunch. Now the COVID-19 disruption has changed the unemployment picture, but vendors still see a pressing need for innovation.

The companies said that this platform significantly reduces integration time and programming efforts, in order to on-board new automation devices into warehouse facilities, which, in turn, provides shippers with more flexibility in selecting robotics systems geared towards their specific business needs, while leveraging Microsoft Azure IoT and cloud platform services.

Just like WES, robot operating systems are undergoing a transformation that may change the way we manage distribution centers.

For many industry thought leaders, analysts and educators, the impact made by the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to realign the current third-party logistics marketplace. But when it does, shippers may expect far greater reliance on innovative technologies requiring substantial capital investment.

While the labor crunch and the ability of AMRs to offload manual travel are central to their success, there are other benefits to robotics in addition to reducing labor requirements.

The key component of this expanded partnership, according to DHL, is ten new, nationwide deployments of the Locus AMR solution, through and Expanded Multi-Site Services Agreement. Today, DHL Supply Chain has roughly 100 bots deployed in two locations, according to Jim Gehr, President, Retail, at DHL Supply Chain North America. Gehr added that with this announcement, DHL is targeting that number to be roughly 1,000 by the end of 2020.

Waltham, Mass.-based 6 River Systems (6RS), a provider of collaborative warehouse solutions and subsidiary of multi-channel commerce platform Shopify, said today that it has rolled out various enhancements to Chuck, its collaborative mobile robot.

Fetch Robotics announced the availability of Workflow Builder, the company’s new drag-and-drop development toolkit that allows shippers to implement flexible automation in existing manufacturing, distribution and fulfillment facilities.

The robots are impressive, but what makes Amazon Amazon is delivering a customer experience. You don't get that by automation alone.

The companies said they will collaborate to facilitate the development of integration tools allowing for faster, seamless implementations to improve productivity and efficiency for shared retail and 3PL customers, as well as establish HighJump as a licensed retailer of Locus’s autonomous, multi-robot solution for warehouse fulfillment, too.

Locus Robotics’ CEO Rick Faulk discusses how robotics can dramatically improve the makeup and efficiency of any fulfillment facility, and talks about the paradigm shift to “think outside the cart” that’s driving this revolutionary development.

Robots, including autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), are seeing rapid uptake in warehouses. The labor crunch and the ability of AMRs to offload manual travel are central to their take-off, but there are other benefits to robotics besides reducing the labor requirement.

It seems that most everywhere you look in the past couple of months there are robots. And they are almost always doing something new.