Canada’s Attabotics is part of a growing field of automation technology providers that are devising new ways to store and handle goods as e-commerce reshapes traditional distribution networks. Amazon and other businesses looking to speed up delivery are opening more warehouses near major population centers. Those facilities are often smaller than the sprawling sites that process online orders near logistics hubs in Pennsylvania, Texas and Southern California, putting pressure on operators to make them more efficient.
The trend has driven greater interest in “micro-fulfillment” centers, which use robotics and automation to pack more goods into small spaces to help deliver orders more quickly to customers, writes The Wall Street Journal (July 30, 2019). Attabotics’s technology uses robotic shuttles to retrieve goods stored in vertical structures. The shuttles move horizontally across a grid at the top, then navigate vertically down shafts with storage on four sides, pulling product bins that they deliver to workers at stations set around the perimeter of the structure.
The system can pick, pack and ship using 20% of the labor and 15% of the space of traditional fulfillment operations. The company has customers in North America in sectors including luxury retail and wholesale food distribution. Attabotics’s technology could also be placed in the back of retail stores to help bricks-and-mortar merchants fulfill online orders more quickly.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Why is there a need for Attabotics’s product?
- How does this system differ from the Kiva robots used extensively at Amazon?