Warehouse Design – Autonomous Mobile Robots AMR’s - Goods to Man

The technology is now maturing at a fast rate, with many suppliers coming to the market with new solutions. The pioneers of this technology were a company called Kiva. Goods to Man AMRs are now available from suppliers such as Swisslog, OWR Robots, Hikrobotics, Körber, to name but a few. 

Kiva Systems are considered to be the pioneers of AMR’s and had deployed them at numerous retail warehouses in the US including Amazon. Amazon bought the Kiva company in 2012 for $775 million. The Kiva system was previously used by companies including: The Gap, Walgreens, Staples, Gilt Groupe, Office Depot, Crate & Barrel, and Saks 5th Avenue. Amazon allowed the contracts to expire and did not renew them, effectively monopolising the solution. Kiva's assets now work only for Amazon's warehouses. The Amazon robots are regularly shown in action in Amazon warehouses on TV or You Tube videos. 

Amazon states that fulfilment centres (FC’s) with robots are 3 times more efficient and 20% faster than traditional, less high-tech FC’s. Amazon currently has over 200,000 robots operating worldwide. Amazon has 175 fulfilment centres worldwide, there are 40 fulfilment centres across the EU including 17 fulfilment centres in the UK. The robots are not deployed at every location. 

In the picture of the Amazon Warehouse below you will notice is the amount of “fresh air” in the warehouse, the vertical space above the shelf units that is not being used. Without doubt, AMR’s can offer highly efficient picking solutions, at the possible expenses of warehouse space utilisation. Ideally AMR’s would operate on mezzanine floors in a high bay warehouse, however, this may cause challenges in transporting goods between floors. 

The high-level process is that received items are checked and manually located into shelf locations. The items are scanned, and the system associate’s the SKU’s and quantities to each individual shelf locations. When the instructed by the control system the shelf unit is returned to the grid storage area. 

 

Comment: with the level of investment required for AMR’s, and in order to maximise efficiency it is commonplace to have “Pick to Light” and “Put to Light” systems deployed at both the inbound and picking workstations. This results in highly efficient operations as only the SKU’s are scanned to ensure product integrity, all other instructions are easily followed by the operator in the form of observing lights or the pushing of buttons. 

Shelf units are sequenced to the pick station where the picker is directed by the screen to the shelf locations, the items are scanned, and the items are located to the destination tray. These trays when full are located to the conveyor system and proceed to the packing area. This results in very high pick rates when compared to a traditional picking operation as the operator is not having to travel between pick locations. 

 

Completed orders can then be packed efficiently without the need to consolidate order lines. 

 

Packing can be performed either at the pick station or in a separate packing area, possibly fed using a conveyor system. The packing process could also be automated, especially in the high-volume retail operation. 

In the UK, the clothing retailer Superdry has an ecommerce return rate around 25% of shipped units, the efficient processing of returns and making them available for sale again was an area that Superdry considered suitable for automation. Superdry and their logistics provider Clipper worked with Hikrobot together with their European partner Invar – a UK based warehouse solutions provider, and conducted a pilot project in 2018 using 6 robots in an area of 8,000 sq. ft. This trial was considered to be a great success and the concept has been relocated into a larger dedicated area of the warehouse on a mezzanine floor.