MHI Solutions Improving Supply Chain Performance
Collaborative robots branching out from manufacturing applications
Locus Robotics’ unique interface will instantaneously change its on‑screen languages to reflect each pickers’ native language—this is done through a nearfield Bluetooth tag worn by the worker that reflects the workers’ profile. PHOTO PROVIDED BY LOCUS ROBOTICS
Today, you’re more likely to find collaborative robots (cobots) in manufacturing plants, but across industries, companies are increasingly turning to cobots as a solution for their warehouse and distribution center operations.
Facing a stubborn labor shortage, safety issues, the need to boost throughput and SKU proliferation, firms are using cobots to perform highly repetitive tasks that make jobs tedious and dangerous for human workers.
Cobots are designed to work safely alongside humans in shared workspaces, and unlike their human co‑workers, cobots can work 24‑7 and are better suited for lower value, repetitive tasks.
“The cobot doesn’t get tired when it’s welding a steel plate onto a car, so the quality of work isn’t diminished over time,” said Guy F. Courtin, vice president of industry and alliances at MHI member Tecsys. “It’s just doing the same movement over and over again, so it’s going to be incredibly precise.”
Sales of cobots are expected to increase at an annual rate of 28% through 2030, reaching $7.2 billion a year, up from $970 million in 2023, according to a February report from ABI Research. Safety, lower average selling prices and accessibility will drive cobot sales, according to George Chowdhury, robotics industry analyst at ABI Research.
“Cobots are at the forefront of the robotics revolution … working side‑by-side with human workers to unlock economic growth,” he said. “Cobots have a synergy with artificial intelligence. The two technologies combined have been leveraged by enterprises to automate tasks that have until now been exclusively reserved for human workers.
“Moreover, the more‑affordable cost and safety of cobots create an opportunity for small and medium enterprises to adopt robotics, unlocking major productivity advantages for broad sectors of the economy.”
Cobots will play a central role in global reshoring initiatives, with sales in North America expected to climb 29% annually to 64,000 units per year by 2030, according to ABI Research. Meanwhile, sales in China are expected to surge 41% a year to 130,000 units by 2030.
Automotive manufacturing is leading the way, with cobot sales growing from 13,000 in 2023 to 115,000 by 2030. Other popular use cases include palletization and inspection, ABI Research said. MHI members Universal Robots, FANUC, KUKA, ABB, Omron and Kawasaki are among a host of established players in this industry, according to the report.
Manufacturing Precision
Chris Savoia, head of ecosystem success at Universal Robots (UR), said companies are embracing cobots for their precision and adaptability. In manufacturing applications such as welding, machine tending, assembly and plastic‑injection molding, cobots can raise productivity levels while occupying a small footprint, he said.
The UR cobot series of robotic arms offers a range of reaches and payloads, and each model is supported by an array of end effectors, software and accessories, making them applicable for a wide range of tasks, Savoia said.
“These collaborative robots are very light, which means you can theoretically move it around by hand, which you would never be able to do with a traditional welding robot that’s made out of cast iron and is huge,” he said. “We’re starting to see a lot of our volume in shipbuilding, where they’re actually picking up the robot and moving it around to different areas in the ship as they’re assembling it because it can be very monotonous running a weld.”
Some cobots can sync with a company’s warehouse management system and use algorithms to cluster similar orders together. The software can suggest the right container for picking each order, and the wheel‑mounted cobot will guide the worker through optimized sequence picking to reduce order cycle times.
Since the cobot can hold many bins at once, workers can batch pick to complete multiple orders with a single pass through the warehouse. MHI member Locus Robotics, a manufacturer of picking cobots, said the technology promotes “true task interleaving,” enabling workers to handle picking, put‑aways and returns simultaneously.
Locus’s cobots have large display screens showing a picture of each object, along with its shelf position and the tote ID and position. A worker picks an item, scans it below the display screen and deposits it into the bin, prompting the cobot to display the next product on the list. Workers spend less time walking through aisles and don’t have to carry products, increasing efficiency while cutting down on workplace injuries and fatigue.
The simple user interface streamlines onboarding and helps temporary or seasonal workers get up‑to‑speed quickly. Since cobots can either be purchased or rented as a service, warehouses can scale up during peak periods, limit overtime and save money on labor.
“We’re seeing a lot of adoption of this technology in e‑commerce, where cobots are working with humans to make picking more efficient and to physically move the goods,” said Courtin, of Tecsys.
“It reduces the overall capital expenditure you have to put into automation,” he added. “With traditional automation, whether it’s a conveyor, a vertical lift or something similar, you’re bolting equipment to the ground, and if you don’t like it after six months, you’re stuck with it. Whereas with these cobots, you can flex up or flex down your robotic fleet, and if you don’t like them after a while, you can just take them offline. That flexibility is the other value we see in the warehouse and the factory.”
Some warehouses and factories are using cobots for dunnage removal, Courtin said. The cobots periodically pick up the receptacles at the end of aisles that get filled with cardboard, paper and other excess packaging materials, empty them in the recycling bin or trash and put the containers back into place.
Dexterity Remains an Issue
John M. Sauer, senior director of global business development for MHI member OPEX Corp., said companies are integrating cobots with automated storage and retrieval systems and sortation systems to speed up production. Traditionally, the ASRS would bring bins of inventory to “presentation ports,” where workers would pick items and fill orders. However, some companies have implemented robotic arms such as the UR series to handle simple pick‑and-place tasks.
Mechanical grippers and end effectors still can’t match the dexterity of the human hand, so cobots typically work best when SKUs are easy to handle and are fairly uniform, Sauer said. One distributor of contact lenses, for example, was able to replace some workers with cobots because the products were packaged in one box size that could be gripped easily.
Having humans in the loop is necessary for quality control, Sauer said. A cobot can’t tell if the shampoo bottle it just picked up is leaking, for example, or if a product’s packaging has been damaged. Relying solely upon robots for picking could lead to a dip in customer satisfaction scores.
“The lowest‑hanging fruit for these types of applications seems to be highly precise work that’s repeated many times over,” Sauer said. “Those highly repetitive, boring jobs often are the ones that create injuries and fatigue, so using a cobot to handle those tasks has benefits beyond labor reduction, including the overall health and well‑being of employees.
“I think the biggest challenge for these cobots is being able to handle highly diverse product types delicately, quickly and accurately,” he added. “That’s what everybody is striving toward, and they’re making great strides as the technology matures.”