Robots On Their Own

In intralogistics, there has been a real hype about robotics for some years now, whether in trade journals or at fairs. Most of them are classic six-axis articulated robots that are looking for their way out of a production environment and into logistics. The goal: fully automated small parts picking. The main driver here is the labor shortage, the big challenge not a technical component like the robot or the gripper, but the design of an overall economic process. Since robots can only handle a portion of the items in each assortment, there are parallel streams of goods and thus possible risks with regard to the flow of goods, inventories, synchronization and consolidation.