Prepare for smart robot revolution
Summary
The main benefits include smart robot deployments across warehousing and logistic facilities, such as removing human involvement in heavy lifting and mile-walking, assisting with order picking and consolidation, and being able to sort packages by destination. “Many logistics and retail businesses struggled to cope with demand due to the pandemic,” said Annette Zimmerman, a vice-president and analyst at Gartner. For Gartner, this has driven retailers and logistics firms to take a serious look at deploying robots to speed up certain parts of business operations. “We developed the hardware like a software product, running sprint cycles and spinning a new generation of bots.” The team uses additive manufacturing to 3D print the parts needed to build 600 series bots. While companies like Ocado are uniquely placed to develop their own role-specific bots, technology leaders in other sectors will need to assess how to approach robotics.