With the last two months of 2020 left, the world is still worried about the pandemic. Although the epidemic has opened the distance between people, it has also promoted the application development of individual industries. Warehousing and logistics robots are one of them.

At CeMAT Asia, an international logistics show that ended last week, a variety of robotic solutions attracted a lot of attention. From redeployed shelves to people, bins to people, orders to people that emphasize light flexibility, automation technology is everywhere.

5SHX1960L0006 It is not difficult to see that the epidemic has not only made the public realize the value of robots, artificial intelligence and other technologies, but also promoted all walks of life to re-evaluate the urgency of reforming production methods.

At the end of October, six ministries and commissions such as the National Development and Reform Commission jointly issued a document proposing the implementation of the promotion plan for robots and intelligent equipment to accelerate the promotion and application of automation and intelligent equipment. For enterprises, the introduction of suitable man-machine collaboration solutions to improve efficiency and stability has been the general trend.

Under the common concern of policy, capital and 5SHX1960L0006 public opinion, the concept of robot automation, which has long been concerned, has been further pushed to the front. However, the previous lessons of the robot industry bubble before and after 2014 are still vivid, and this wave of new heat is to follow the trend to create a gimmick, or there is real ability?

Coincided with the “double 11”, we may wish to explore the e-commerce warehousing logistics robot as a specimen.

Starting: Amazon acquires a warehouse robot company for $775 million

In March 2012, Amazon announced the acquisition of a company called Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash to bring its AGV (automated guided vehicles) products into Amazon’s warehouse network.

Kiva robots at work in an Amazon warehouse

In simple terms, AGV is a kind of robot car that can walk along the specified navigation path through the electromagnetic track, two-dimensional code and other navigation methods. In the early days, such robots were mainly used in the field of production and manufacturing, and major global auto factories such as Toyota and Volkswagen widely used AGV in manufacturing and assembly lines.

With the “blessing” of Big Brother and weather vane Amazon, the AGV concept quickly became popular in the e-commerce logistics circle. In China on the other side of the ocean, new recruits such as Hairou Innovation, Siasong, Fast Cang, and extremely Zhijia compete to enter the game. According to Geek Park’s report, by the end of 2018, according to incomplete statistics, there were more than 50 warehousing AGV enterprises in China.

In fact, it was around 2018 that the European and American industries began to reassess the general applicability of AGV in the field of e-commerce warehousing. After several years of verification, we found that the flexibility of AGVs seemed to be unable to adapt to the 5SHX1960L0006 pulse fluctuations of e-commerce traffic – because each additional AGV in the warehouse must be rearranged. Heavy early investment and later superimposed costs make it suffer the test of this cycle.

In the Asian market, e-commerce warehousing AGVs have also experienced acclimation. For example, Asian customers generally attach great importance to the effective use of warehouse area, and the navigation guidelines such as QR codes and tracks required by AGVs, as well as their fixed movement trajectory, are not conducive to the improvement of storage area utilization.

Warehouse aisles in Asia are generally narrow, making it impossible for larger robots to operate

In addition, many countries in Southeast Asia are raw materials and production countries, and the process between local e-commerce production and sales is relatively short. Unlike large importing countries such as Europe and the United States, e-commerce warehouses in Southeast Asia do not have too much storage demand, but are dominated by distribution centers and selection centers. As a result, AGVs, which are good at material handling, seem to be stuck in a rut.

Therefore, in the following few years, another type of robot gradually replaced AGV, and frequently appeared in the discussion of e-commerce warehousing logistics, which is AMR.