Automate 2022 Recap: Integration as the Future

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) had some encouraging industry growth news to tout at the start of its Automate show in Detroit earlier this week: After a record year in North America for industrial robot orders in 2021, that momentum has carried into the first quarter of 2022.

A3’s figures show that North American companies started the year by purchasing the most robots ever in a single quarter, with 11,595 robots sold at a value of $646 million. That’s up by 28% by units and 43% in dollars over the first quarter of 2021, and 7% and 25% respectively over the previous best quarter, Q4 of 2021. Back in February, A3 reported that industrial robot sales in North America had a record year in 2021, up 28% over 2020 and 14% higher than the previous top year in 2017.

A3’s figures are for industrial robots, which are mainly those with articulated arms that do tasks like picking and placing goods, as opposed to autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that have gained a significant foothold in warehousing and materials handling.

In my two days at Automate, that momentum was visible in the solid attendance at the event as well as the number and variety of exhibitors. By variety, I especially mean more AMR vendors with larger booth exhibits, compared to past Automate events. Yes, the biggest exhibit spaces tended to be from major robotic arm providers like Fanuc, Universal, Kuka, and others, but mobile robots were to be found at 20-plus booths, not just a handful. Then there were major, diversified technology providers like ABB, Teradyne, or Zebra Technologies, who’ve acquired AMR vendors, are Automate exhibitors, and were showcasing AMRs as part of what they offer.

This shift in exhibitor variety at the show is likely tied to the underlying pressures facing companies with production and fulfillment operations. Everyone is dealing with acute labor challenges, tighter cycle-time pressures, and the need to move goods to end customers as quickly as possible once they can secure raw materials or receive finished goods to distribute. As a result, all types of automation and robotics solutions are seeing strong interest. There are more robotic arm solutions being sold, but often as part of integrated solutions which aim to accelerate overall operational speed and efficiency.

Given these larger pressures, many of the vendors I visited with were talking about integration of fixed piece-picking robots with AMRs, as well as integration of robots with other forms of automation like conveyors and automated storage & retrieval systems (ASRSs), and for that matter, with software and devices that support human-centered workflows.

Industry leaders I spoke with say this trend toward converged, integrated solutions is driven by industry needs around speeding up the entire flow of an operation, not just one corner of it.

At Plus One Robotics, which provides vision software for logistics robots, integration was the focus. Their booth demo showcased a robotic arm driven by Plus One’s vision software picking and placing a highly varied mix of parcels onto mobile sortation robots from Tompkins Robotics. The two vendors announced an integration partnership earlier this year that allows Plus One’s software and Tompkins’ tSort AMRs to work in concert to accelerate fulfillment processes in DCs.

Plus One’s software provides an industrial robotic arm with the perception and eye-hand coordination capability to pick and place objects in DCs which have high package variability, explained Erik Nieves, Plus One’s founder, while the tSort system offers a scalable means of automated sortation. Last fall, Plus One also partnered with Locus Robotics to integrate AI-enabled piece-picking with AMRs from Locus.

Generally, Nieves explained, automation of all types needs to become more integrated—not just robots with each other, but robotics with traditional fixed automation like ASRSs or shuttles, as companies seek to accelerate the overall fulfillment process while offsetting the inability to find enough human workers to stick with manual tasks which often exist on the edges of their operations.

Nieves foresees that more and more companies will turn to solutions from robotics partners to extend the benefits of traditional automation like an ASRS, so that you don’t have one big zone of automation in the middle of a DC, but then bottlenecks upstream or downstream.

“If you make gains by automating in one area, but what exists is downstream remains manual, all you are really doing is moving the bottleneck,” said Nieves. “That is why fulfillment centers are going to turn to integrated solutions that can expand the benefits of automation out from the center, from something like an ASRS. That is where the value increasingly will come from—in deploying flexible robotics automation out from the middle, so you can have efficiencies not just in one area of your fulfillment center, but from one end of the building to the other.”

Another robotics industry executive I got to meet with is Melonee Wise, VP of Robotics Automation at Zebra Technologies. Wise joined Zebra through the 2021 acquisition of Fetch Robotics where she was the CEO. Fetch’s AMR solutions continue to be advanced upon as part Zebra, with part of these advancements coming in the form of integration with Zebra’s solutions for work execution software, mobile devices, scanning, data capture, and label printing.

Our meeting came Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Wise was part of a panel discussion at the event’s show floor theater, titled, “How Robotics and Automation Are Transforming the North American Economy,” which also featured other top industry leaders including executives from Fanuc, Teradyne, Nvidia, as well as Greg Brown, VP of the Advanced Technology Group for UPS.

During the panel, Wise observed that traditionally robots have acted as “sole agents” focused on narrow tasks, and thus historically not adept at operating collaboratively in integrated, multi-agent settings. But that is changing, added Wise, via integration to other types of automation as well as people-centered workflows and data capture devices and technologies like printers.

After the panel, Wise said in an interview that the value of mobile robots will increasingly come from how easily they integrate with other automation and with software and devices, so that user companies can speed the overall fulfillment process and have robots that work well in tandem with people.

“When you look at the needs of customers, what they after is an end-to-end solution,” Wise said. “They don’t want just a robot, they want a solution to their problem. And if their problem is how do I get something off the shelf, and packed out, and onto a truck on time, it involves addressing this cascading series of tasks. But if we can create this interconnected world that takes in mobile robots, and mobile devices, and things like printers, and packaging machines, then there is greater value for our customers, because they can optimize across their larger process.”

In a brief interview after Tuesday’s panel discussion, UPS’s Brown said that just in the last few years, advancements in machine vision and AI software have made it possible to do more with industrial robot technology in logistics, because the robots now have AI-enabled intelligence to be able to deal with more package variability. “The technology is definitely maturing and getting better and more precise,” Brown said. “Depending on the application, it’s going to vary as to how useful it is today, but it’s definitely getting to the point where is it becoming more useful and allows us to think about ways to incorporate it into our operations and day-to-day practices.”

AMR vendor executives say they are enjoying rapid growth, often driven by customers who started out with small proof of concept projects a few years ago, grew them into larger pilots, and have now expanded into production-scale fleets. In a visit to the booth of Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR), a global AMR vendor and a subsidiary of Teradyne, Søren Nielsen, MiR’s president, said this progression to larger fleets is fueling MiR’s growth.

“It is expanding rapidly both with new projects, and also, existing customers who now have much larger fleets,” Nielsen said. “The pattern we see is that they deployed maybe a few robots as a proof of concept, then expanded that further after 12 to 16 months, and now are increasing the size of their fleets to production scale. We now have customers with 100 to 200 robots in their fleets, and one customer with 86 robots in a single facility. And, at the same time, they are after better and better utilization of the robots.”

As AMRs get more widely deployed, Nielsen said that users want to achieve very high utilization of AMRs and want to do away with any incidents where an AMR needs manual intervention. Typically, he adds, it’s a matter of fine-tuning aspects like wireless network performance, or the setup of docking points, or analyzing traffic management patterns in fleet software, to bring the percentage of missions with no interventions to a high level. “AMRs are not toys anymore, they are becoming part of production environments, which is why we see this focus on utilization,” he says. “This is what we see—larger fleets, and higher interest in utilization.”

MiR is known for larger format AMRs, and while it is expanding its product line, there are so many AMR types and potential use cases, says Nielsen, such as cleaning robots, inventory scanning robots, and assistive-pick AMRs, that it is inevitable customers will have AMRs from multiple vendors, with a resulting need for a layer of “interfleet management” software. He said that MIR isn’t developing this capability itself, adding that some of its customers are looking at using software from Amazon Web Services (AWS) called RoboRunner for this purpose.

Other notes of interest from visits at Automate:

• SVT Robotics had a sizeable booth at Automate. The vendor, which offers a software platform to speed and simplify integration of robotics solutions with host systems like a warehouse management system (WMS) or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, has drawn significant funding from investors who see industry interest in rapid integration of robotics solutions. Jim Hodson, VP of marketing for SVT, noted it’s not just deployment speed for one robotic solution that interests companies in SVT’s SOFTBOT platform and its “connector” approach to integration, but also the ability over time to reconfigure an integration, or integrate additional robotics solutions to a host system, leveraging the same connector, rather than starting from scratch.

• Startup InOrbit was at the show exhibiting its cloud robot management platform, and also as one of the finalists for Automate’s Cowen Startup Challenge. Florian Pestoni, InOrbit co-founder and CEO, explained that InOrbit’s software is essentially a cloud data platform that robot vendors can use to improve the performance of what they offer to end users, and now new “orchestration” features in the platform along with a partner certification program allow end-user organizations to use the software to avoid conflicts between different types of AMRs, without competing with the fleet software from each AMR vendor. For example, InOrbit’s solution can be used so that cleaning robots don’t interfere with large AMRs moving pallets, or to keep inventory counting bots out of the aisles being used by other bots. “You want each system to do what it does best, without interfering with each other,” said Pestoni.