Flexibility among the priorities

WITH THE cost of borrowing on the minds of many, firms will be looking to improve and expand warehouse operations, ideally without making large capital investments.

Autonomous mobile Robots (AMRs) promise, among other things, flexible, modular handling and picking solutions warehouses that can start small and scale up if needed.

Exotec vice president of sales Western Europe, Remy Malchirand told HSS: “The solutions are built to be super flexible, that’s why we work so well in retail and eCommerce applications where it is very difficult to forecast.”

To increase the throughput of an installation, the number of robots deployed can increase. 

Remy adds: “You can buy an additional 10-20 robots. For customers that are dealing with Peaks, you can rent robots. Some of our customers pretty much double the size of their fleet, just for two months.”

The last few years have, of course, seen a massive amount of disruption. This period has seen a sharp rise in the use of AMRs.

“It’s not like traditional automation,” says Remy. “Where companies go to a customer and ask ‘what’s your volume going to be like in 8-10 years?’ With a solution sized to that, it will take a long time to return on investment.

“So what we do is we build the solution, and make it very easy to expand. You can have a system with 20,000 locations, and if demand rises, you can build another, and integrate it.”

Exotec’s standardised tote boxes come in 400mmx600mm, with three height varieties and can carry loads up to 30kg.

Remy says: “We think of our solution like Lego. The reason it is very standardised is to make it easy to plug and play components into the system, such as a picking station. We can do this in a few days. If this takes too long, you lose the benefits of flexibility, scalability and speed inherent in the system.”

Remy says this is crucial, with many companies frequently needing to ramp up quickly, whether it to cope with Peaks, a 3PL changing a contract, or in response to M&A activity.

The racks used in the Exotec system are built to its own specification to allow the robots to rise with the tote boxes. The company builds its own robots, conveyors and importantly develops its own software. It is telling that Remy’s background is with WMS leader Manhattan Associates.

“The robotic system is great but it is the tip of the iceberg, it’s what you can see. But a big part of the clever stuff is in software. If you see a large Exotec system operating live, such as with Decathlon - 12 metres high, 200 robots, 100,000 locations - it really brings it home as you see everything moving at 4m/s in an incredible ballet. It’s all managed by software in real time. Task assignment and route optimisation are really key for Exotec.”

AI

Software and artificial intelligence (AI) also plays a key role with AMR leader Geek+ Robotics. It’s about more than simply guiding the robots.

Geek’s UK & Ireland head of sales and marketing, Simon Houghton says: “Our AI is multi-faceted. We have sites with over 1,000 robots so traffic management is important. The other part of it is inventory management. From day one we start to create a heat map, to nudge fast moving items as close to the pick stations as possible.”

Some businesses have a lot of SKUs, maybe 40-50,000, and not all companies have rotational data for these SKUs, so this can be helpful. Geek has taken this approach one step further with its latest systems.

“AI Tally gives you visibility on your orders the night before, and you can shuffle the totes on the mobile rack to be joined together for the order. So it’s one instead of 20 trips.”

One of the highlights for Geek at the recent IMHX show was PopPick.

Says Simon: “This is a very high density storage solution, from which totes and pallets can be delivered to the picking station. This picking station has very high performance, up to 650 tote presentations in and out per hour potentially.”

It has a similar software to Geek’s core system, so you can merge the two, achieving toteable and non-toteable item picks that can be consolidated on the same station, which can be very handy for eComm firms where very different items can be ordered together. In addition, Geek has robotic picking units that go up to 8m in height, very much aimed at maximising item density at and near the pick face. It uses a crane AMR, which passes on to a small, rapid AMR that can deliver two totes to the station.

“This RS+P40 system doesn’t need conveyors to route to the picking stations,” adds Simon. “This saves space, cost, and means less maintenance of mechanical systems, but still gives great performance - 400 tote presentations per hour.”

Looking to the future, Geek anticipates that robot arm technology will prove increasingly important. 

Simon continues: “We are looking at collaborations with robotic arm picking, at the pick point, picking from a tote to a tote, or picking from a pallet to a tote. The robotic arm would work in harmony with the picking station and effectively you could have a man-less picking operation. This will be Phase 2 for some smart warehouse and smart factory operations, and built from the start for others. Robotics arms have moved on so much in terms of vision and gripper systems. Before, these systems might have only been able to pick 30% of SKUs, now it’s 80-90% in some businesses.”

Mobile manipulations

Melonee Wise, VP of robotics automation at Zebra Technologies also sees important progress in store for robotic arms in AMRs.

“The next decade will probably see more focused mobile manipulations, for example, robotics arms on top of mobile robots, or stationary arms interfacing with mobile robots. For the last couple of years, we’ve parallel development - mobile robots and static arm picking and over the next five years, we’ll see these come together.”

Melonee continues: “The most efficient picking approach for mobile robots is batch picking. If you are doing this, then you need to singulate items. This can be done with a tote carrying robot to bring the batch to the robot arm which singulates to other totes which are then despatched as orders.”

It all depends on the use case. If you look at Amazon’s journey, the online retailer went hard with Kiva, deploying some 500,000 robots because they found a compelling use case.

“Now they are on the other side of that journey and they are developing their own AMRs because there are other applications the Kiva robots are not suited to. We will see a lot of inter-mixing of technologies to achieve the range of outcomes required in the warehouse.”

Software

Melonee also concurs with Remy’s point about software - you could see these fleets as primarily software products.

“Before the acquisition [of Fetch Robotics by Zebra, Melonee was CEO of Fetch] we had an engineering team of about 80 employees, and 70 were software engineers.”

“Autonomy and optimisation software are the two big areas, in other words how do AMRs function in the warehouse, and how do you orchestrate them to carry out what the workflow demands as effectively as possible.”

On the Autonomy side, Zebra has invested a lot of energy in making the robots more socially aware, and easier to work with from a human perspective despite being among the fastest driving AMRs in the market. 

On the optimisation side, it is important to tackle how AMRs connect to other systems, as a downside can be AMRs operating in silos.

“There tends to a lack of offerings at the Warehouse Control System (WCS) layer that will connect to robots,” explains Melonee. “That’s where you will see more investment from AMR providers to start bridging those islands of automation. 

“We made the decision early on to expand beyond the robot and incorporate IoT, for example, in a partnership with SICK to control conveyors and doors etc, and a lot of that works out of the box for us.”

AMRs have come a long way in boosting warehouse picking processes, but we hope this article highlights how the journey is only beginning.