DC Velocity - July 2018

A top-heavy product such as a hammer, for instance, must be gripped closer to the head. Further complicating matters, the handle or nail remover portion of the head may get tangled or buried beneath other items, making the choice of which one to pick next more complex; the extraction motion from the bin will be more complex as well. Such actions require more advanced vision and path planning solutions, Parrott says.

“Additionally, most [robotic picking] applications being demonstrated [today] pick and drop the product in an order tote or container,” she says. “If a large variety of products need to be [deposited] in a specific place or in a defined orientation so that they are not damaged, this requires more advanced planning on the placement side.” Parrott says she has no doubt the technology will get there, and she also points to growing investment in “mobile bots”— robots that move throughout a facility as opposed to picking arms and other stationary solutions—as another particularly hot area of research today.

“You’re seeing advances in automat-
ing ‘goods to person’ [picking],” she says.
“There is a lot of focus in this area, and
we will see even more development in the
years ahead.”
A separate industry study underscores
the point. Industry research firm Interact
Analysis released a study this spring pre-
dicting that the value of the autonomous
mobile robots (AMRs) market will grow to
$7 billion in 2022 from $1.1 billion in 2017.
The burgeoning e-commerce sector, mass
personalization of goods, and a shortage
of low-cost labor are driving the trend,
the research firm said. Deck-load mobile
robots—those that have decks or flat sur-
faces to transport pallets or cartons—are
the most common, with 180,000 forecast
to be shipped in 2022. Mobile robots with
mounted arms are less commonly used,
but are increasingly entering the research
and development phase. Interact Analysis
predicts that 12,000 of these types of robots
will be sold in 2022.

Logistics is the fastest-growing vertical
market for mobile robots, with revenues
predicted to jump to $3 billion in 2022
from $300 million in 2017. Mobile robot
use in the manufacturing sector is expected
Finding enough workers can be
especially difficult for e-commerce
retailers looking for seasonal ware-
house help.

Robotics hold the potential to
address such problems on a large
scale because they can be used to
perform repetitive tasks such as
picking, freeing up workers for
other tasks throughout the facility,
Parrott explains. But the technology
still has a long way to go to address
the variety of products in the mar-
ket with the reliability and adapt-
ability of a human. Today’s robotic
picking solutions do a good job of
moving products from one place
to another, but further research
and development will be needed
before they can perform some of
the more complex, precision-based
tasks required in dynamic picking
environments.

“At the moment, most of the piece-picking robotic applications are using end effectors with either vacuum cups or a simplistic 2/3/4 finger gripper. The robot path planning provides a centralized pick point and general extraction path to avoid collision with the bin or objects in the environment,” Parrott explains. “This will work on a large number of products, [but] some products need to be picked up in a specific way and extracted [so as] not to entangle or damage other items next to them.”