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Robotics in the News How Robotics Can Fit Your Operation Omron and Taiwanese collaborative robot company Techman Robot form strategic alliance Three end-of-arm robotic companies become OnRobot North American machine vision market sets new records ABI Research outlines eight technologies that will transform manufacturing More Robotics News Smart Glasses: The latest weapon against downtime Not every facility has experienced maintenance technicians at the ready. With a combination of video, augmented reality and more, smart glasses provide a direct link to remote technicians who know how to guide others to get equipment back up and running. All Resources If you wanted to create the perfect mix of conditions to trigger the growth of a type of automated equipment for distribution center operations, you couldn’t do much better than the factors lining up in favor of robotics. E-commerce and omni-channel fulfillment are driving labor-intensive piece picking, and warehouse labor is increasingly difficult to find and retain. DC operators know they need to automate to reduce these challenges, but few operations are able to plunk down millions for traditional automation projects that carry long payback times and might be difficult to reconfigure. Enter a new generation of robots, based on technology that uses on-board sensors and a more “natural” approach to navigation. Research shows high interest in robotics. According to MHI’s “ 2018 Annual Industry Study ,” 65% of professionals surveyed now see robotics and automation as a major source of disruption and/or opportunity, up from 61% last year. Analyst firm Interact Analysis forecasts the market for autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and smart automatic guided vehicles (AGV) for logistics will grow from $300 million in 2017 to $3 billion by 2022, or roughly a 10-fold increase. “We are seeing true exponential growth now,” says Ash Sharma, a research director for Interact Analysis. […]