How robots are redefining logistics in Packaging Warehouses?
Ecommerce has elevated the humble packaging warehouse to a place of crucial importance for modern businesses. The changing demands of consumers are forcing businesses to rapidly increase the capacity and productivity of their inventory management and packaging operations to remain competitive.
Ecommerce has elevated the humble packaging warehouse to a place of crucial importance for modern businesses. The changing demands of consumers are forcing businesses to rapidly increase the capacity and productivity of their inventory management and packaging operations to remain competitive.
Harnessing the power of warehouse automation
Robots have been performing automated tasks on manufacturing lines for decades. They are increasingly being employed on the warehouse floor, moving inventory, picking and sorting products, and packaging them for shipment to customers. Their advantages are many. They are stronger, faster, make fewer errors, don’t get hurt, don’t take breaks, and in the long-term cost much less than salaried employees. Robotics and automation offer the kind of productivity gains that companies need in an online world.
The range of work that robots can efficiently perform is expanding by the day and the modular nature of robotic tools allows companies to deploy them at their own pace and solve their biggest problems first. The opportunities for productivity gains in all aspects of warehouse operations are already huge, and they will grow. The addition of artificial intelligence to the mix will help robots master more complicated and diverse tasks and take warehouse and packaging processes to new levels of productivity.
Automated inventory management
The future of robotics in the logistics environment is being worked out on the floors of Amazon¹ Fulfillment Centers. At the heart of the world’s largest e-tailer are mammoth warehouses increasingly populated by robots lifting, transporting, picking, sorting and packaging products--all while interacting respectfully with Amazon employees.
Giant robotic arms lift 3000-pound pallets into and out of tight spaces 25 feet above the floor. Robotic drive units carry mobile pods back and forth across the vast space to picking stations for employees to prepare orders. Box-on-demand robots scan items for shape and size and automatically produce 700 custom-sized boxes per hour, according to PC magazine. The machines cost $1 million but can replace 24 workers and recoup their cost in just two years.
AI-enabled, free-roaming robots that can help employees work orders for irregular or unwieldy items are a work-in-process.
Innovation in logistics productivity is the source of Amazon’s greatest competitive advantage. The automation of inventory, warehousing, and packaging processes enable it to keep pushing the envelope on quality, cost and delivery speed to its customers.
Order picking and fulfillment automation
Robots are great for heavy lifting and carrying, but they are also increasingly adept at more nimble tasks like picking items from a conveyor belt or storage grid to fill a customer order.
Ocado², the world’s largest online-only supermarket in the UK, uses about 1000 robots to manage a huge grid of thousands of grocery products at its state-of-the-art fulfillment center in Andover, England. Many of them are storing and retrieving bar-coded items according to an ergonomic design that reduces the time and effort needed to fill orders. Others are robotic pickers with agile arms, vision sensors and enough intelligence to distinguish between items on a conveyor belt.
The robots are interchangeable and controlled by a central computer enabling them to collaborate to assemble grocery orders in a fraction of the time it takes humans. Ocado’s Andover facility has the capacity to fill 65,000 orders per week for roughly 3.5 million grocery items. The company is now selling the technology to other grocery chains looking to improve their logistics productivity.
Packaging automation
Packaging products manually is a labor-intensive, inefficient, costly, and often hazardous job for human beings. Not for robots. The processes are typically quite simple and repetitive, making them ideal candidates for automation.
The Japanese robotics firm Fanuc³, a provider of robots for manufacturing lines for decades, also produces a range of robots that can handle packaging tasks like palletizing and picking and sorting products. The Fanuc’s iRPick robotic arm has advanced “vision” capabilities to rapidly pick even small, irregular items off a conveyor belt to place into packaging on a separate line. Fanuc’s software allows businesses to coordinate robots to handle some or all of its packaging needs.
Floracraft, based in Michigan, a producer of foam products for the craft and floral industries, uses Fanuc robot pickers to pick products from a conveyor and place on an adjoining table where another robot, (the Fanuc LR Mate 200iD/7L), packs them into cases. The boxes are sealed and handed off to a robotic palletizer, (Fanuc M-410iB/140H), in preparation for shipment.
Warehouse Optimization
The growth of e-commerce and the resulting needs to manage more direct-to-consumer orders has put a premium on warehouse space. Use it well and your online business can flourish. While many businesses have chosen to hand off their logistics functions to third party providers, scalable and increasingly affordable robotics and automation tools offer an alternative.
Robot butlers tending the warehouse floor keep things ship-shape, helping optimize warehouse layouts, maximizing storage space, and generally improving order fulfillment times. The “butlers” are AI-enabled autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that store and retrieve products to deliver to picking stations for employees or other robots to prepare for shipping. Produced by Atlanta-based GreyOrange⁴, the butlers are controlled by GreyMatter software, and collaborate to transport stackable storage units to appropriate locations.
With sophisticated sensors and AI algorithms, the AMRs optimize their collaborative routes for product retrieval. That means less travel time and faster fulfillments.
You don’t have to be the size of Amazon to benefit from robotic automation. The systems are increasingly scalable and dynamically react to changing demand patterns and inventory mixes. More storage racks and robots can be added to increase fulfillment throughput during peak periods of demand.
Quality control and inspection
Robots and automated processes aren’t just faster and cheaper than human beings, they also make fewer errors. Quality in the packaging function is crucial to protecting products, reducing waste and satisfying customers. Not only can robots perform manufacturing and packaging tasks with fewer errors than humans, they can also more efficiently detect problems with products or packaging when they do occur.
Swedish-Swiss multinational ABB⁵ specializes in quality control robots that speed up the inspection process to quickly resolve problems. The robots inspect and measure products and packages with powerful 3D camera sensors attached to a flexible arm. They capture multiple images of an item and compare them to a master CAD model. That enables real-time identification of problems, helping to reduce the amount of scrapped products and rework expenses. The modular system can be customized and expanded as business needs change.
The days of forklift crews and floor managers managing a cluttered warehouse are numbered. Robotics and automation are already boosting productivity in how businesses manage their inventory, use their warehouse space, and package their products.
Welcome to the intelligent warehouse
Human beings remain at the center of the warehouse. They are being replaced by robots on packaging lines and in a variety of warehousing functions because the changing landscape of modern business demands it. The repetitive, often hasardous, tasks of hauling, packing, and wrapping products for shipment to customers can be performed far more efficiently and safely by machines. In an ecommerce world of higher volume and faster order fulfillment needs, automation is an economic imperative.
People, however, will always be needed to ensure that automated processes function properly, that problems are diagnosed, and needs anticipated. Businesses still need human beings to run the show. Robots are simply freeing up employees from the mundane work of the warehouse to focus on more creative, revenue-generating and customer-facing activities.
The robot is evolving to be a better partner to humans in all circumstances.⁶ Consider Miroka and Miroki, two adorable and sophisticated robots that maneuver deftly on a rolling globe, have opposable thumbs and can change their facial expressions to better engage with human beings. Built by Enchanted Tools, they are highly intelligent and are intended to perform repetitive tasks in a healthcare setting and in customer-centric industries like travel and hospitality. They are ideal companions for children undergoing medical treatment because they can adapt to their environment. These two innovative robots have won an award for the product design at the SXSW2024.
The warehouse of the future is also an adaptable entity. AI tools and machine learning will enable more autonomous robots to better coordinate their actions to achieve constant productivity gains across all aspects of packaging and logistics operations. As business needs and inventory mixes change, so will the automated processes that most efficiently fulfill customer orders.
Sources:
1-https://www.waredock.com/magazine/what-is-amazon-robotic-fulfillment-center/
2-https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17331250/automated-warehouses-jobs-ocado-andover-amazon
3-https://www.fanucamerica.com/solutions/applications/picking-and-packing-robots
4-https://proglove.com/blog/greyorange-proglove-maximizing-warehouse-efficiency-through-collabomation/
5-https://new.abb.com/products/robotics/application-cells/3d-quality-inspection
