If we take the words ‘efficiency, accuracy, safety, productivity, and scalability’, the term ‘robotics’ could happily take the central spot on a wheel encircled by its numerous benefits. With the continued pressure on warehouse and distribution centres, manufacturing and production facilities to achieve the Holy Grail of operational goals, it’s little wonder that robotics is set for a massive boost, with over 4 million commercial robots being installed in over 50,000 warehouses by 2025, according to ABI Research. This remarkable figure is a dramatic rise from just under 4,000 robotic warehouses back in 2018, highlighting the surge in uptake of this versatile and reliable technology.
What’s fuelling the rapid rate of adoption? The need for flexible, efficient, and automated systems to handle customer order processing, inventory storage, picking and packing, and the wider supply chain with accuracy and efficiency. Crucially, this planned take-up of warehouse robotics will also be spurred on by the increasing affordability of the technology, offering entry-level equipment for SMEs and a favourable Return on Investment.
Robotics is a broad term under which sits a wide range of robots of all shapes and sizes, from AMRs and shuttle systems to palletisers and AGVs. Taking palletisers as a case in point, advanced robotic palletisers are engineered to meet specific operational requirements for goods stored in containers such as totes, boxes, trays, and sacks. They carry out repetitive tasks with efficiency and careful handling to ensure product integrity and accuracy of order fulfilment, while improving safety and productivity with minimal human intervention.
Robot palletisers have traditionally been seen as end-of-line automation tools, often with a single robot cell tasked with stacking goods onto a pallet before onward shipment. Yet with wide-ranging advancements such as AI and machine vision, and combining other integrated technologies, palletisers have become significantly more intelligent and capable. They now offer a more integrated and scalable solution that serves operations in a more complete and effective way, capable of multiple tasks such as strapping, wrapping, checking, and weighing goods, as well as automatically printing and applying labels to complete the palletising process, all within one unit.
Taking things in reverse, de-palletising robots provide an equally robust solution for automating the process of unloading products from pallets, helping to streamline operations by increasing throughput and eliminating the reliance on and cost of manual labour, which in turn reduces the risk of injuries.
Ideally suited to logistics, e-commerce, retail, food & beverage, consumer packaged goods, and healthcare applications, robot palletisers effortlessly handle changing pallet patterns and multiple SKUs, are easy to integrate with existing processes and other automation technologies, and are scalable for enhanced operational agility. With all these benefits at your fingertips, isn’t it time you spin the wheel of robotic fortune and see where it lands?
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