Emerging warehousing robotization solutions

Automation in warehousing has been rapidly growing in the last ten years. All over the world, the leading companies in Material Handling Equipments (MHE) have strongly increased their R&D spending to develop successful new solutions and cope with this higher and changing demand. Today, solutions such as X-sorters (Cross belts, Tilt-tray,..), Pocket sorters, AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicules), ASRS (Automated Retrieval & stocking systems) with staker cranes, miniloads, multi-shuttles, … are becoming widespread in many industries and have proven their efficiency both in terms of productivity and service.

We wanted here to present a panel of emerging solutions more focused on robotization as you can see below:

These solutions are emerging technologies and share some key characteristics:

/ Rise of the AMRs: AutonomousMobile Robots (AMR) can be used in various situations in the Warehouse, such as carrying loads, sorting parcels, or being assistant for picking,… They mainly differ from AGVs by the fact that AMRs can be managed as a fleet with powerful algorithms

/ Development of robotics arms with dedicated tooling

/ High level of flexibility with low or no physical infrastructure needed , and some providing Raas solutions (robots as a service)

Of course these solutions are still not fully mature and some are present only in one region (US , Asia, or Europe,..). But they bring new opportunities, either as a solution for some typologies of flows not covered by the existing MHE solutions, or as an alternative to them.