Although it’s not quite Christmas yet, the festive season for the retail industry has already begun, with retailers seeing spikes in demand last week for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. To quickly adapt to these shifts in demand, some retail warehouses are turning to mobile robots.
Frazer Watson, iFollow’s Vice President of Sales for UK and Ireland, believes that Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) are a key solution to the need for “flexible intralogistics processes” when adapting to peaks and troughs in demand.
Watson explains his view that retail warehouses benefit from “easily adaptable, robust, and reliable equipment that not only performs everyday functions, but can also be scaled up whenever necessary to meet peak demand”.
He continues: “Few items of intralogistics equipment tick these boxes as successfully as AMRs, which is one of the reasons why robotics has become an integral part of warehouse operations.”
Robotic solutions within the warehouse have increased in recent years, with data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) showing that the number of industrial robot installations worldwide in 2021 hit an all-time high 517,000, representing a 31% increase on the previous year,
Furthermore, IFR data also shows that the number one application of professional service robots sold in 2021 was within the transportation and logistics sector, purchasing more than double the service robots of than any other industry.
iFollow (Stand i312) will be at IntraLogisteX on 28-29 March 2023 at the NEC Birmingham. For more information, visit www.intralogistex.co.uk.
