“ Maybe they started with collaborative picking , but are now looking at truck unloading or at basic transport uses ,” he said . “ The long and short of it is starting to look at using robots across their entire operations .”
And it is not just large , monied companies that are looking to adopt robotic technologies ; small to medium-sized enterprises are also getting in on the action .
Klappich conceded that warehouse automation generally has been the domain of big companies “ with 50 to 100 hundred million dollars to invest in automation ”. But now , he points out , “ you can pick up a robot for a thousand dollars a month , which means companies of any size can have it ”.
He adds : “ If you look across a warehouse operation there is a need for different robots to perform different things . Take truck unloading , for example . I might have one kind of robot that unloads palletised goods , and a different kind of robot that unloads case goods .
“ What this means is that companies will have robot fleets composed of robots from different vendors , and this creates another challenge , in terms of how to orchestrate the work between these different companies , which are multiplying in number very quickly .”
So what do these companies need to help support these fleets of varied robots ?
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