The Future of Warehouse Robotics: New white paper from Geek+ and Interact Analysis

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: The Future of Warehouse Robotics: New white paper from Geek+ and Interact Analysis.

Geek+, the AMR technology provider, and top market intelligence firm Interact Analysis have jointly released a new white paper, The Future of Warehouse Robotics, that examines where the industry is at the beginning of 2022 and the new approaches made possible by AMR technology.

The growth of e-commerce, accelerated by the jet fuel of the COVID-19 pandemic, has pushed the logistics and supply chain sectors into overdrive and brought forward the timeline of automation. As more and more companies look for answers to challenges such as labor shortages and space constraints, Geek+ is providing AMR-based solutions today and working to innovate and develop new, ever more specialized approaches.

The white paper makes it abundantly clear that AMRs are not solutions of the future, but are the reality on the ground today and will continue to shape and drive warehousing solutions tomorrow. Faster, more flexible, more cost effective, and easier to scale, AMRs’ advantages over traditional, fixed infrastructure are plain to see. As the paper states: “if a team of well managed mobile robots can pick and carry any item to any location in a warehouse, why would anybody ever install a fixed conveyor belt ever again?”

Highlights of the white paper include:

• How the world of warehousing has changed
• Tote-to-person (T2P) AMRs and mobile automation solutions
• Real-world case studies
• The evolution of goods-to-person (G2P)
• AI-powered solutions 

One aspect of the white paper looks at the modularisation challenge. Not every customer will want a combined mobile robot solution, yet it is an important and growing sector. Customers tend to start by automating the low hanging fruit, only when that is implemented successfully do they look for the next automation opportunity. Yet, no matter how widespread the trend becomes, multi-robot solutions will never be available entirely ‘off-the-shelf’. A degree of customisation will always be required, but modularisation will be possible, and this will cause costs and implementation time to fall significantly further over time.

In fact, modularisation is a key driver of adoption. That’s because customers tend to want a new site up and running in the shortest possible time with minimal disruption to their operations. And, once a modularized solution has been adapted to the needs of a specific customer, it can then typically be copied across all that customer’s warehouse sites with ease. Generally, going with a single integrated supplier is the most efficient possible way to do this in the shortest possible time.