In a world experiencing large-scale production transformation, epidemic, climate related challenges and turbulent markets, the golden age of internal logistics intelligent automation has just begun.
2021 is a year of global supply chain disruption. Although the term "supply chain" has attracted much attention in history, it gained a darker tone last year as blaming the supply chain for various product shortages became part of a public trend.
Back decades ago, globalization made it possible to manufacture products, from daily necessities to bulk commodities, which can be dispersed to countries around the world. With container ships cruising the ocean in a non climate friendly way, the OECD estimates that ocean transportation carries about 90% of trade goods.
However, the system proved inflexible in the face of dual pressures - labor shortages and increased consumer demand related to the coronavirus-19 pandemic (more or less directly), mainly through e-commerce. This led to the entire container fleet waiting for unloading at coastal ports and occasionally empty shelves.
In addition, the figures illustrate their situation - more than 11 million jobs in the United States have not been filled, including many distribution centers and warehouses that have long relied on almost unlimited access to cheap labor. In the short term, the response is to make these jobs more attractive.
For decades, large conveyor belt systems and manually operated forklifts have been common in most warehouses. Today, automation and other material handling machinery are playing a major role in warehouses. Now a deeper change is taking place, which will grow exponentially in the next 3-5 years - switching from the current combination of fixed / flexible automation and human beings to fill the gap to a new mode, that is, intelligent and autonomous robots can handle different special tasks, allowing people to deal with the most advanced and abnormal parts of the process.
This emerging model is realized by a new generation of robots, which have only one similarity to the traditional fixed function robots usually related to automobile manufacturers. In fact, this change has been going on for some time - according to relevant data, 2019 is the year when robot orders in the non automotive industry exceeded those in the automotive robot industry for the first time.
Relying on powerful processors, a large number of sensors and artificial intelligence (AI), these robots are significantly more flexible and intelligent than previous generations. More intelligent robots, including autonomous mobile robots (AMR), cooperative robots (cobots), UAVs (for indoor or outdoor), quadrupeds and industrial robots (usually matched with computer vision systems and intelligent manipulation software), are dealing with more and more tasks.
This is not a futuristic fantasy. Throughout manufacturing and retail, we can see robots designed for various tasks, such as yard work, order execution from goods to people, autonomous forklift, mobile automatic storage and retrieval system (as / RS) and last mile distribution. However, each of these systems is only a link in the whole process of cargo transportation. Many of these robots work in a limited range and perform a single task.
As individual tasks are handled by these specialized robots, there is a growing demand for an emerging practice called robot operations (robops). Similar to how Devops can learn from best practices and make cloud computing possible to expand to the current scope, robops enables robots from different suppliers to integrate efficiently and seamlessly with the core workflow and processes constituting the supply chain.
Looking forward to the relationship between robots and human workers, we see that the role of human labor is changing - from muscle strength to autonomous robots supervised and enhanced by human operators. An emerging role is the robot administrator, an operator responsible for several robots to ensure that the end-to-end process operates effectively and is not interrupted. Even better, this emerging role can usually be operated remotely to work at home or from a central location, rather than actually working on the floor of a warehouse or retail store. It will be possible to connect with robots through powerful cloud based software and faster networks.
