The future of the warehousing and distribution industry is looking more robotic. Manufacturers are increasingly making moves toward utilizing artificial intelligence in factory lines, but now advanced tech is entering the supply chain with warehouse robots and delivery drones. According to the Harvard Business Review, global population of robots is expected to double to about 4 million by 2020, and they are becoming cheaper, smarter and gentler as new models are released and innovations are made.
One of the industries most impacted by the advent of new robotic technologies is the warehousing and distribution business. From the manufacturing side, robots have been building cars and assisting in food production for years, but they are starting to get their stride in the warehouse as well. A topic especially popular in recent months is drone technology.
Robotic Order Fulfillment
Delivery drones may become more acceptable for use in the industry in the coming years. This technology may allow companies to deliver products to customers in same-day or next-day timeframes. According to ZDNet, drones could be used in the supply chain to do same-day deliveries of food, books or other small items, and the technology continues to evolve, so the sky is the literal limit when it comes to these drones.
In the warehouse, drones can be used for intelligent picking and pallet handling, according to Material Handling and Logistics contributor Tom Andel. Amazon is one of the first companies to develop operations based around drone tech both in the warehouse and on the delivery road.
“With little superstructure or extensive hardware to install, a drone-based palletizing solution could be deployed rapidly, and should be capable of a relatively high sustained load throughput,” the company has said about its efforts to put a drone-based strategy into effect in its warehouses.
Inventory management could also become easier in the future as drones are more integrated in the warehouse. According to TechCrunch contributor John Biggs, drone tech was being developed by the German Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics so that companies could use it to quickly and more efficiently take inventory during the 2014 holiday season. The idea was that robots could use barcode scanners and immediately transmit data to a central resource management system, increasing productivity and speeding up processes.
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