The last few years have been a major accelerator for the robotics industry at large, but warehouse robotics may be the biggest winner of all. Stay at home orders fueled adoption in the early days of the pandemic, as some retailers stayed open after being labeled "essential businesses." Even after things began reopening, those roles have remained difficult to fill, leading many firms to look toward robotic help. All the while, Amazon has had a jump on most of the industry, dating back to the company's acquisition of Kiva Systems a decade ago. The competition continues looking for angles to compete with the 800-pound e-commerce gorilla, and robotics startups have flooded the field, promising an edge.

DHL is using robotics to support numerous warehousing and logistics tasks. DHL innovates its logistics workflow and the tools and technologies deployed in DHL distribution centers around the world, as the company continually improves its efficiency. Sally Miller, DHL Supply Chain's chief information officer for North America, recently spoke to The Robot Report about the types of robots the company uses and the innovation cycle it employs to find the most effective solutions. Sally Miller will also be a keynote speaker at RoboBusiness, which takes place in Santa Clara on Oct 19-20, 2022. The full interview with Sally was featured on a recent episode of The Robot Report Podcast, which you can listen to here.

Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics, will deliver a keynote presentation at the Robotics Summit & Expo. The international event is focused on the technical issues involved with the design, development, manufacture, and delivery of commercial robots. The Robotics Summit & Expo takes place May 10-11 in Boston at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Faulk's keynote, called "Robotics Automation in the Warehouse: Optimizing Productivity with Business Intelligence," takes place on May 10 from 9:30 AM to 10:15 AM. Faulk will describe how automation solutions can provide companies with various types of key business information, a valuable and actionable resource for business planning, operations optimization, labor management and more.

June 2020 is off to a hot start for developers of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Yesterday, OTTO Motors announced a $29 million Series C, and today Locus Robotics closed $40 million in Series D funding. The Series D brings Locus' total amount of funding raised to $105 million. Locus' latest round was led by Zebra Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Zebra Technologies. Existing investors such as Scale Venture Partners also participated in the round.

The COVID-19 pandemic is poised to accelerate adoption of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to ease supply chain backlogs. Even before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the global economy, leading companies that distribute large amounts of goods were deploying, or evaluating, AMRs such as DHL and Ryder. UPS yesterday announced that it has begun deploying AMRs in some of its facilities to consolidate orders. UPS wants to "create more custom and turnkey outsourced fulfillment services to meet our customers' unique supply chain needs," according to a statement from Philippe Gilbert, UPS's president of supply chain solutions. The weak link in warehouse automation efforts is the shortage of people to fulfill the steady rise in e-commerce transactions.

During NYFW last week, Rag & Bone returned to the runway after a three-year break and, true to form, brought a technology twist to its show. The brand partnered with Microsoft to bring a giant robotic arm to its runway show, which captured 360-degree angles of the models and performers, and presented it to the audience in real-time on screens in the amphitheater. It used cutting-edge technology, but its incorporation served more as a marketing tactic for Rag & Bone -- and it's a strategy the brand has come to rely on. To debut the brand's Fall 2019 collection, Rag & Bone opted out of a runway show and instead hosted a dinner experience called "A Last Supper," where it used AI to capture guests in attendance on video. Though these stunts work to grab attention, where robotics is making an impact in fashion is behind the scenes. For example, many brands are currently using robotics to cut down fulfillment times in warehouses and speed up manufacturing, using robots to cut and sew fabrics at a faster-than-ever pace.

What we refer to as autonomous mobile robots are not. They are not really autonomous that is. Autonomy suggests some level of independence by a human, or a robot, in picking which tasks to work on and how they are completed. But the ROI from mobile robots is based on the centralized intelligence that choreographs the movement of human associates and the fleet of robots that support them in in a manner that minimizes travel for the associates. Both Jerome Dubois, the Co-CEO at 6 River Systems, and Bruce Welty, the Chairman at Locus Robotics made a similar point during different presentations referred at eft's 3PL & Supply Chain Summit in Atlanta in early June.

In this episode, Abate De Mey speaks with Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics, about warehouse automation with collaborative robots. At Locus Robotics, they increase the productivity of workers in e-commerce warehouses by using robot helpers to transport items that are passed to them by the workers. The lightweight autonomous robots move at a similar pace to their co-workers, use LIDAR and computer vision to detect people and avoid collisions. This allows people to share the warehouse floor with the robots. The collaborative robotic system is lightweight and can be adapted to existing warehouses with minimal alterations.

In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems for just over three quarters of a billion dollars, securing for itself virtually the entire large-scale robotic logistics market all at once. This was a particular problem for existing Kiva customers, including Quiet Logistics, who used Kiva robots to support centralized warehouse operations for a variety of clients. Once Quiet Logistics' contract with Kiva ran out, they'd need to find some new robots. Recognizing the enormous value that Kiva robots provided and the potential of the void that suddenly existed, a bunch of companies began to target the robotic warehouse fulfillment space. There's Adept, Fetch, Clearpath, IAM Robotics, and Magazino, to name just a few.