DC Velocity - May 2018

www.dcvelocity.com MAY 2018 DC VELOCITY 31 warehouse, some vendors offer a warehouse management system (WMS), some offer a warehouse control system (WCS), some offer mobile bots, some offer vertical storage, and some are good at singulating items” (an industry term for removing a single piece of inventory from a loaded bin), he said.

Partnerships between logistics technology providers may not yet be common in the industry, but RightHand has made several similar deals before, Tenzer said. The company announced in March it had integrated its RightPick piece-picking solution with an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) from Sencorp White and had previously integrated its technology with a sorting system from EuroSort Inc., a shuttle system from Honeywell Intelligrated, and an auto-bagger from AccuPac.

Each partnership supports a variation of the “ goods-to-robot” fulfillment method, which reduces the number of humans needed and can help cut costs and improve reliability for fulfillment in retail, pharmaceutical, electronics, grocery, apparel, and other operations, according to RightHand.

Partnerships between robotic systems providers
could impact the logistics industry by building up an
ecosystem of modular mobile robotics, said John
Santagate, research director for service robotics at the
Framingham, Mass.-based analyst firm IDC. The con-
cept of enabling mobile robots with robotic arms for
piece picking isn’t necessarily new, he said, pointing
to providers such as inVia Robotics Inc. and IAM
Robotics. But achieving that capability through partner-
ships between independent technology providers could
allow those firms to focus more tightly on their core
competencies, Santagate said.

The approach of providing robotic platforms in a bundle—instead of as separate spot solutions—could also boost their adoption by retail customers that may not be interested in becoming early adopters of new technologies, said Michael Murrison, director and principal of supply chain services at Boulder, Colo.-based consulting firm SCApath LLC. “Making robotics more accessible is critical to the adoption rate in supply chain, and generating cohesive fulfillment use cases will certainly help both Vecna and RightHand in that cause,” Murrison said.

—B.A.

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