From SCDigest’s On-Target E-Magazine Gartner Says Just 5% Adoption at High End by 2018, but Longer Term AGVs will Transform DC Operations SCDigest Editorial Staff Will automatic guides vehicles (AGVs) finally start to make penetration into distribution center applications? SCDigest has been writing about that potential for many year, as a new generation of smarter, more flexible AGVs came to market in the mid-2000s, notably but far from exclusively from vendors such as Kiva Systems (now part of Amazon.com) and Seegrid. (See New Life for AGVs in Distribution? ) SCDigest Says: Things such as embedded analytics and use of agent-based technologies will enable the robots to optimize work across the group and respond to unforeseen events, such as a breakdown or a bottleneck. But progress has still been slow in the broader market – the exception being Amazon’s rollout of some 15,000 Kiva robots across 10 DCs in 2014. In its global logistics "predicts" for 2015, the analysts at Gartner believe there will be some uptick in AGV-like robot adoption in DCs over the next few years, as the technology improves across a number of important dimensions. There are actually several type of robots that are used in distribution centers. Palletizers – which look the most like traditional industrial robots – take cases away from divert lanes of one kind or another and build mixed SKUs pallets. These palletizing robots may become even more popular in combination with various automated case picking (ACP) systems. One type Of ACP system itself can also be considered a robotic device as well – so-called "gantry systems" in which a case grabbing mechanism (usually a vacuum system) moves horizontally and vertically on the gantry to select cases from full pallets on the floor. As cases are picked, the gantry system then generally drops them […]