What if you could reduce your warehouse labor expenditures by nearly half, add 24 hour shifts that significantly boost your production capacity and have access to troves of live data on all aspects of your facility? Warehouse robotics systems can help you transform your business, slashing costs, increasing output and strengthening profitability.
Types of Warehouse Robots
While a handful of warehouse robotics technologies have been around for a very long time, others are state-of-the-art solutions that have the potential to fundamentally change the warehousing industry as we know it. The primary types of robotics system are:
Articulated Robotic Arms: Robotic arms with multiple joints can pick up and move items in a warehouse. They’re commonly applied to receiving tasks, like relocating goods from pallets to racking, or in production settings, for picking and shipping.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly know as drones, can deliver live inventory data in a warehouse by using RFID technology.
Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) : AS/RS can retrieve products from racks and put items in their appropriate storage slots. Examples of AS/RS solutions are pallet shuttle systems, unit load cranes and horizontal or vertical carousel systems.
Goods-to-Person technology (G2P): Rather than using humans to pick items from storage locations, G2P solutions employ robots to dispense items to picking stations, where workers are positioned to complete orders as goods are delivered.
Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) : AGVs, including self-driving forklifts, carts or pallet jacks, transfer goods between areas inside a warehouse. Cart based AGVs are commonly referred to as Automatic Guided Carts, or AGCs.
Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) : Similar to AGVs and AGCs, AMRs can transport products across a warehouse autonomously. Unlike AGCs and AGVs, which move along predetermined paths often directed by magnetic strips or wire tracks, AMRs rely on maps, cameras and sensors to navigate more flexible routes by interpreting their environment.
Applications For Warehouse Robots
Until recently, robotic applications in distribution centers and warehouses, warehouses and distribution centers were limited to a handful of functions. As technology has improved, robotic capabilities have broadened and they can now be applied to nearly any requirement in a warehouse:
Loading and unloading: While complete automation of unloading and loading trucks is not yet a realistic possibility, automated systems like AGVs and conveyors can be added to augment your loading dock efficiency.
Palletizing and de-palletizing: Robotic systems are well suited for monotonous, recurrent work like palletizing. Palletizizing robots generally employ a special End-of-Arm Tool to collect items and position them on a pallet. They’re frequently paired with conveyors that feed products to the palletizing area.
Sorting: Robotic sortation systems must have the ability to grab objects, identify them and deposit them in a suitable bin or storage slot. As goods move along a conveyor, these systems use cameras to recognize individual items and select them.
Picking: The vast majority of workforce costs in a warehouse originate from order picking functions, and robotic picking solutions have been around for quite some time to help address this problem. Nevertheless, contemporary robotic picking solutions offer greater speed, better accuracy, more efficiency and superior value as compared to systems of just a few years ago.
Packaging: Robotic solutions are well suited for recurrent and tedious functions like packaging. They may also be used for more complex tasks like dimensioning, weighing and cartonizing.
Transportation: Robotic transportation systems are used extensively in warehouses, from simple AGVs / AGCs to AS/RS integrated conveyors and AMRs.
Storage: AS/RS solutions emoby many types of warehouse robots, including cranes, pallet shuttles and mini-load systems. AS/RS is also sometimes used together with mobile racking systems to optimize space utilization.
Delivery: Large e-commerce businesses are conducting research on self-driving trucks, autonomous delivery drones and other advanced options that will revolutionize last mile delivery options in the coming years.
Replenishment: Leveraging RFID to monitor inventory, warehouse drones can survey barcode labels in half the time of manual scanning and communicate stock counts back to the WMS in real time.
Industrial Robotics Companies Near Me
To find out more about industrial robotic solutions for your warehouse, speak with an automation expert at Welch Equipment today!
