Coronavirus Accelerates logistics automation higher up the agenda

By | February 13, 2022
retail systems automated retail

From Robotics and Automation Apri 2020

What’s on the minds of automated research these days?

This landscape – and therefore, the scope of the report – includes the following:

  • Automated guide carts and vehicles
  • Autonomous mobile industry vehicles (forklifts, tugs, and so on)
  • Goods-to-person automated carts / robots
  • Collaborative autonomous mobile robots
  • Mobile picking robot (regular- and irregular-shaped items)
  • Autonomous trucks (level 4 and 5)
  • Delivery vans and pods (level 4 and 5)
  • Last-mile sidewalk delivery robots
  • Delivery drones

This is a fast-growing market space. The landscape was set on fire when Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, thereby leaving a gap on the market.

Today, significant well-funded alternatives such as Geek+ ($389 million), GreyOrange ($170 million), and HIK Vision ($6 billion revenue) have emerged, achieving promising and growing deployment figures.

The number of start-ups has also increased, especially within the 2015-2017 period.

The emerging technology research firm finds that this market – in total – will reach $81 billion and $290 billion in 2030 and 2040, respectively.