An army of robots is rising in warehouses around the world, intelligent machines and automation are spreading throughout the core of the logistics industry, helping to sort and process online purchases, select groceries and package manufactured food products.Consumers are demanding faster and cheaper shipping from internet retail, and the companies that run these facilities are introducing cutting-edge technology to make what have traditionally been labour-intensive processes more efficient.
Mobile Robots
The machines whizzing around the warehouse receive instructions about the locations of goods; they then pick up the large shelving units, which can weigh hundreds of kilos, and transport them to human workers, who either pick out the relevant items for orders or store products. Every day, an army of thousands of these mobile robots assists in the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of orders from a single distribution center.
Swarms of Robots
A very different kind of automation is also used by some companies where internet food orders are handpicked by employees pushing trolleys around supermarkets after opening hours. They have their own system that retrieves items for humans back.
Swarms of robots inhabit a two-dimensional chessboard, and under each chess square is a stack of bins, and robots lower a grab and pick up a bin and bring it up to the robot’s body, after which the robot can move to another square and deposit that bin on top of another stack. So it’s basically a massively dense cube of groceries with these robots roaming around on top.
Collaborative Robots or Cobots
These robots work alongside humans and respond to their flesh and blood counterparts. If we look at where the production lines work at the moment, come back in ten years’ time. It’ll still be a production line but it might look a lot different and the people on a production line particularly may be less but they may be doing different jobs in the other facility.
Employment and Robotics
Despite the efficiencies that come with these technologies there are still fears of job losses as manual tasks are increasingly performed by machines. At the same time, eCommerce is contributing to the decline of high-street employment, but Amazon has been expanding and claims that robots have not replaced human workers; it is opening facilities in the coming years and will eventually create thousands of jobs.
Companies also claim that as fewer human hands are required for menial functions, more rewarding technical jobs will become available.On the other hand, critics say that although the logistics industry might have created some new jobs it’s not always secure employment with decent terms and conditions.
Conclusion
To sum up, Above mentioned points are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more robotics technology offers to the logistics industry changing its dynamics in the most phenomenal ways possible.
Are you looking to implement robotics technology into your logistics business? If yes so please feel free to contact us at support@aeologic.com
