How would it affect your business if you could reduce your warehouse labor expenses by 50% or more, add around the clock shifts that significantly boost your production capacity and have instant availability to troves of up to the minute metrics on every aspect of your facility? Warehouse robotics systems can help you transform your business, slashing expenses, boosting productivity and strengthening profitability.
Types of Warehouse Robots
Although some types of warehouse robotics technologies have been around for many years, others are state-of-the-art technologies that may bring about major changes the warehousing and distribution business as we know it. The principal classifications of robotics system are:
Articulated Robotic Arms: Robotic arms with multiple joints can grasp and move goods in a warehouse. They’re often applied to receiving tasks, such as moving goods from pallets to racking, or in production scenarios, for picking and packing.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly know as drones, can maintain live inventory insight in a facility by leveraging RFID technology.
Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) : AS/RS can pick up goods from shelves and return items to their appropriate storage positions. Examples of AS/RS solutions are horizontal or vertical carousel systems, aisle cranes and pallet shuttle systems.
Goods-to-Person technology (G2P): Instead of using human labor to pick items from racks and bins, G2P solutions employ robots to dispense goods to picking stations, where employees are stationed to fill orders as products are delivered.
Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) : AGVs, including self-driving pallet jacks, forklift or carts, transfer products from one location to another inside a warehouse. Cart based AGVs are sometimes called AGCs, or Automatic Guided Carts.
Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) : Like AGCs and AGVs, Autonomous Mobile Robots can transport goods across a warehouse autonomously. Unlike AGCs and AGVs, which move along predetermined routes often guided by magnetic strips or wire tracks, AMRs rely on cameras, maps and sensors to navigate non-static routes by interpreting their environment.
Applications For Warehouse Robots
Until recently, robotic applications in warehouses were restricted to a handful of taks. As technology has advanced, robotic capabilities have broadened and they can now be used for almost any requirement in a warehouse:
Loading and unloading: Although total automation of loading and unloading trucks is not yet a possibility, automated systems like AGVs and conveyors can be employed to enhance your loading dock operations.
Palletizing and de-palletizing: Robotic systems are ideal for monotonous, repetitive functions like palletizing. Palletizizing robots normally employ a specific End-of-Arm Tool to grab items and set them on a pallet. They’re frequently paired with conveyors that transport items to the palletizing area.
Sorting: Robotic sortation systems must be able to pick up objects, ID them and put them in a suitable bin or storage slot. As products advance along a conveyor, these systems use cameras to identify specific items and select them.
Picking: A considerable portion of the labor costs in a warehouse are a result of order picking activities, and robotic picking tehnologies have been around for many years to help address this problem. However, today’s robotic picking solutions offer increased speed, improved accuracy, enhanced efficiency and superior value versus systems of just a few years ago.
Packaging: Robotic solutions are perfect for recurrent and monotonous functions like packaging. They can also be used for more complex jobs like dimensioning, weighing and cartonizing.
Transportation: Robotic transportation systems are widely used in warehouses, from simple AGCs/AGVs to AMRs and conveyor systems that are integrated with AS/RS.
Storage: AS/RS implementations emoby a variety of warehouse robots, including mini-load systems, cranes and pallet shuttles. AS/RS is also sometimes used in conjunction with mobile racking systems to optimize storage density.
Delivery: Large e-com companies are experimenting with autonomous delivery drones, self-driving trucks and other technologies that will fundamentally change last mile delivery options in the coming years.
Replenishment: Using RFID to keep track of inventory, warehouse drones can scan barcode labels in half the time of manual scanning and relay inventory information back to the WMS instantaneously.
Industrial Robotics Companies Near Me
If would would like to learn more about industrial robotic solutions for your warehouse, get in touch with an automation expert at Welch Equipment today!
