Top Opinions of the Year

• The 3 Big Market Forces Driving Investments in AMRs
  Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are quickly becoming a must-have technology for warehouses, especially those that perform e-commerce fulfillment operations. Research firm Interact Analysis predicts that by 2025, 2.1 million mobile robots will have been shipped worldwide. Beyond the number of robots, it is important to consider the number of sites where the technology is deployed. “At the end of 2020, mobile robots had been deployed in just over 9,000 separate customer sites, mainly warehouses and factories,” writes Ash Sharma, managing director of Interact Analysis. “By the end of 2025, this will have increased to over 53,000 deployments, and that will still be far from the point of market saturation.” This represents a compound annual growth rate of over 42% between 2020 and 2025 in terms of sites leveraging AMRs. Many that assume this growth is being driven by the ever-present desire to reduce operational costs are often overlooking other drivers. While operational cost reduction is important and measurable, there are far more impactful issues driving the investments of AMR technologies today.
   
• How Robots Are Helping Fuel the Rise of 3PLs
  We’ve all seen the numbers citing how unprecedented e-commerce growth has been over the last 18 months. Sales grew 40% in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. The switch to online shopping that was prompted by necessity because stores just weren’t open is here to stay. People like convenience, and online purchasing has now become a habit for them and many won’t switch back completely to brick-and-mortar shopping. The latest forecast is that we’ll spend more than $4 trillion dollars shopping online this year. While increased demand is great for the increased sales for retailers, it creates a lot of pressure on their fulfillment operations. It’s particularly challenging for retailers that are doing the majority of their business through physical retail stores. The process of getting products into the hands of customers is very different in a physical store, where stock is replenished in bulk pallets and cases to onsite storerooms. E-commerce orders consist of individual items in random assortments that are stored in large distribution centers centrally located to ship across the country – or globe. They also have to be stored in a specific way that allows random access to any particular item at any particular time. This can be much more complicated than replenishing store inventory. This has given rise to increased demand for third party companies that specialize in managing e-commerce fulfillment and logistics.
   
• How Robots-as-a-Service Can Help a Warehouse Operation
  The robots-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model reduces the heavy, upfront investment for co-working robots. Traditional business models required a warehouse to make a cost-intensive capital expenditure for robot hardware upfront. RaaS, on the other hand, enables companies to switch to a monthly payment and realize a return on investment on day one. The new model became popular in the mid-2010s when industrial and manufacturing organizations began leveraging robotic arms on an as-a-service basis. Soon, small robots used for goods-to-person and person-to-goods conveyor applications adopted the model. After that? RaaS began to take off. The growing demand for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) combined with concern about capital preservation is driving RaaS into discussions around high-capacity self-driving materials handling equipment. Style Intelligence even included this trend in its market research, citing major interest for RaaS with autonomous pallet-moving vehicles in warehousing, manufacturing, and distribution centers.
   
• Defining Privacy Standards for Autonomous Mobile Robots
  Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have become an increasingly common sight in grocery stores and retail facilities around the world, taking on repetitive tasks such as floor scrubbing, vacuuming, shelf-scanning and more, to help free up workers for other activities. These intelligent machines safely navigate in high-traffic, public settings by leveraging cameras and other sensor-based technologies. For many people, cameras in public spaces imply surveillance due to how they have been used traditionally (e.g., traffic cameras, retail security cameras, etc.). But for companies in the autonomous mobile robotics industry, cameras are used for the purpose of helping self-driving robots navigate the world around them in a safe and efficient manner. For these technology providers, an ongoing challenge is to build public trust and help reshape preconceived notions regarding the use of camera images. At Brain Corp, we’ve designed our products with data protection in mind and are committed to being a trustworthy champion of data privacy within the AMR industry.