Research Overview

The need for automation in logistics and warehouses is being driven by the increasing popularity of e-commerce which has experienced a further boost, same-day delivery demands, shortage of labor, and the time wasted by labor in travelling long distances and carrying out monotonous tasks and lastly the incapability to scale existing solutions such as conveyors or automated guided vehicles or forklifts to meet the customer demands.

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have become widely popular not only in the field of e-commerce retail warehouses but have proven to have capabilities to collaborate with humans in different industries such as hospitality, healthcare, security, fashion, and third-party logistics. AMRs are highly scalable and are available in customer-friendly RaaS business models which makes it easy to adopt them.Frost & Sullivan's analysis of key patent publication trends and global adoption scenario shows that while there is a lot of funding and focus into the development of the navigation of AMRs, the technology is under development for space applications as well.