DC Velocity - December 2019

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The triple scale design enables significantly shorter product gaps with transport speeds of up to 3. 4 m/s (670 ft/min) and a 50 ms measuring time. EMFR technology and Active Vibration Compensation delivers superior weighing accuracy.

Visit us at MODEX, Booth 9219.

SHORTER PRODUCT GAPS
SIX SCALES COMBINED IN
ONE WEIGHING UNIT
Catchweigher
HC-FL-T
wipotec-ocs.com

that offers RaaS plans.

“[RaaS] is terrific for customers because
it provides them with a low threshold to
entry; you don’t have to write a check for
$1 million, just $10,000 a month,” Leavitt
says. For customers, it’s a low-risk prop-
osition because the pay-as-you-go service
is considered an “operational expense” in
accounting terms, as opposed to a pur-
chase-based “capital expense.”
“If it were a cap-ex purchase and then
you have second thoughts, you’ve already
bought it and it basically becomes a large
paperweight in your facility,” Leavitt says.

In addition to flexibility, RaaS plans offer users many of the same advantages as the popular Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription-based software offerings, Leavitt notes. “So, as with SaaS, [you can] rely on the fact that you’re going to have quarterly updates to the software. And you share a long-term business relationship,” she adds.

According to Locus, that relationship is
critical to helping warehouse operations
deal with one of the most pressing chal-
lenges of the era—the labor shortage. “The
macro problem we’re addressing is labor
availability and effectiveness,” Leavitt says.
“Because labor is unavailable, wage rates
have been going up. So this allows [ware-
houses and fulfillment centers] to get the
same amount of work done with half the
labor.”
Across the industry, warehouse automa-
tion vendors—including major players like
Vecna Robotics, Mobile Industrial Robots
(MiR), and InVia Robotics—are increas-
ingly offering their robots on an RaaS basis,
helping to bring bots into DCs of all sizes.
By making those robots easy to “hire,” sim-
ple to “train,” and inexpensive to “rent,”
Robotics as a Service has become a crucial
tool for helping warehouse operators avoid
getting snowed in by a blizzard of orders
during the winter holiday rush. n
the cloud, so the only informa-
tion physically stored on a robot
is its own navigation software
and collision-avoidance system,
says Melonee Wise, CEO of Fetch
Robotics, a San Jose, California-
based AMR vendor that offers RaaS
plans. If a vendor swaps out an
older robot for a new one, it resets
its onboard computer, ensuring
that sensitive information on the
client’s sales and customers never
leaves the building, she says.

That approach makes it easy to add more robots to a fleet because every robot shares the same knowledge base, Wise says. In fact, warehouse managers often find the technical setup process to be easier than training their human employees to work with the new equipment, she adds.

“You have to have your workers
be ready to interact with the new
robots,” Wise says. In past years,
workers were sometimes afraid the
robots would take their jobs, but the
latest generation of workers is more
likely to see robots as collaborative
tools to help boost productivity.
“The fear is no longer losing their
job, but being competent enough
to work with the robot,” Wise said
during a recent panel discussion
on supply chain technology during
the MHI Annual Conference in La
Quinta, California. “So if you can
disarm that as soon as possible, they
transition to embracing their robot
co-worker. And then they go from
fear to curiosity.”

ROBOTS ON THE RISE

Thanks to its rising popularity, the RaaS approach is helping to accelerate the adoption of robots in the logistics industry, reports Karen Leavitt, chief marketing officer at Locus Robotics, a Wilmington, Massachusetts-based AMR vendor