Mobile robot trends show shifting requirements

THIS IS for three major reasons: First, average selling prices have dropped considerably with companies like HIK Robot – benefiting from a low-cost supply chain – driving down prices. Second, customers are shifting to other solutions such as tote-to-person, and to some extent cube-based storage systems, which offer greater storage density. Third, the slowdown of new greenfield warehouse building (which tend to be most suitable for shelf-to-person AMRs) has reduced the overall opportunity for the robots.

Strong revenue growth is forecast for most other mobile robot products. Most notably case picking, person-to-goods, tote-to-person and forklifts robots are all forecast to grow by more than 30% in 2024. Case picking is an emerging type of robot with relatively few vendors, however major customers are now adopting them in warehouses and the potential opportunities for the market are huge. Interact Analysis chief commercial officer & VP of research - robotics & warehouse automation Ash Sharma, says: “Our analysis of warehouse throughput and labour estimates that close to 90,000 full time equivalents (FTEs) were required for case picking in the US alone in 2022 and that 36 billion cases were picked during the year. This is a substantial amount and demonstrates that the market opportunities for case picking robots are also enormous.

“While person-to-goods has seen delays in customer rollouts impacting order intake in 2023 and 2024, revenue growth is somewhat protected due to the robot as a service (RaaS) model that is often implemented. Similarly, automated forklift growth is less susceptible to short-term economic dips due to the long commissioning timescales, huge backlog and multi-site (and often multi-country) contracts that customers have signed with vendors. As a result, we expect steady 20-30% annual growth for automated forklifts.”

Market size

Interact Analysis has cut its forecast for the global mobile robots market 2024 due to a slowdown in China. That said, the firm said the mobile robot market grew by 27% in 2023 to reach $4.5bn globally. 

Ash continues: “This strong revenue growth came despite tough conditions caused by a large backlog from preceding years. Despite this, growth in the US market will help drive global revenues to reach $5.6bn for the year.

“While we still expect strong demand for AGVs and AMRs, our 2027 projections are now approximately $2bn lower than before. This is almost entirely attributed to slower demand for order fulfillment AMRs. Our forecast for material transport mobile robots is broadly unchanged since the last report. This part of the market is relatively more mature and predictable. On the other hand, order fulfillment AMRs are still an emerging and nascent product which makes long-term growth harder to predict. However, the industry has now grown to a size where it is no longer immune to the wider economy. Previously, project sizes (and hence investments) were much smaller, and customer projects were abundant. This meant the AMR market was in effect too small to be impacted by wider economic performance and could still grow effectively through economic slowdowns. We now appear to have hit the inflection point where that is no longer the case.”

Despite the points covered above, Interact’s outlook for the industry is still extremely positive with the underlying drivers of growth remaining strong. In 2027 we predict that annual revenues for mobile robots will surpass $14bn.

For more information, visit https://interactanalysis.com