How Warehouse Robots Are Revolutionizing The On-Demand Economy
Digital retail giant Amazon has over 200,000 robots helping deliver more than 350 million different products in an unceasing flood of billions of deliveries. Its fulfillment machine with both free and fast shipping has become a key competitive moat against other retailers: free shipping and 1-day or 2-day shipping is why Amazon customers chose Amazon.To get more news about Robots on Demand, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
So how can other retailers, whether giants like Walmart or smaller brands, compete? One way is by stealing a march on the e-commerce behemoth and automating themselves.
This surge in automation, driven by our on-demand economy, is boosting growth of the warehouse robotics space more than 15% every year and and causing the ecosystem to more than double in size by 2027, hitting over $23 billion in value. Plus, according to industry experts, it’s also boosting productivity 200-300%.
Locus Robotics is a seven-year-old logistics automation startup with $300 million in funding that’s on track to pick a billion items this year. And boosting productivity isn’t always about the biggest, smartest, most capable robot that can go anywhere, find anything, take it off the warehouse rack, and bring it where it needs to go. Sometimes it’s just about lending a helping hand, and letting humans do what they do better.
I recently talked to Locus Robotics CMO Karen Leavitt on the TechFirst podcast.
“Our robots know what the item is, nobody has to look at a list. The robots go to the location where the item is being stored, and then a worker meets the robot there,” Leavitt says. “By doing it that way, we are doubling or even tripling the productivity of the humans in that warehouse, and we're cutting down on the amount of walking that they do by probably 75 or 80%. These are people who, without the robots, would be walking 10 to 15 miles a day. And now they're down to just a few miles a day because they're interacting with the robots.”
In other words, warehouse robots don’t necessarily need to do all of the job. Getting variably-shaped objects of variable weight off shelves of variable height and depth is a challenging robotic endeavor. Humans do it much better — at least right now. Robots, however, are much better at wheeling around a multi-hundred-thousand square foot warehouse and saving humans all that walking.
Locus ships robots via what we might call robots-as-a-service model, adding extras during busy times like holidays. “Training” time for a new robot is essentially zero: connect then to the robotic network and they’ll be assigned tasks and integrated into the flow of work immediately.
The robots also reduce training time for workers. Instead of two or three weeks to learn all the tricks of the logistics trade, they can essentially hang out in a specified area of the warehouse. As a robot comes up and flashes some information to them, they can grab the right item and give it to the robot.
