Piece Picking Robots Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

Piece Picking Robots Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

Piece Picking Robots Market is expected to register a CAGR of 62.5% over the forecast period from 2022 - 2027. COVID-19 has significantly increased the sales of automated solutions, as well as the logistics requirements. Though the supply chain has been disrupted due to lockdown, the industry has grown significantly. The Warehouse order pickups are considered the most time-consuming part of the supply chain, with picking robots promising to shorten it. Mobile piece pickers, thus, the offer can replace the number of hours that workers spend moving around the warehouse.

Key Highlights

• According to inVia Robotics, Inc., the time workers spend walking from location to location throughout the warehouse accounts for about 50% of the total pick time and represents more than 50% of all operational costs. Additionally, finding and retaining staff in today's tight labor market is challenging, often resulting in a repetitive and expensive cycle of hiring and training temporary workers. All these determinants on a cumulative basis fuelling the market growth.
• For instance, to help the core task of picking and placing individual items and further realize the operational benefits of robotic collaboration along the supply chain, DHL is working alongside tech specialists, such as Fetch Robotics, to explore the multiple applications of robotics in logistics, offering greater efficiencies to organizations and their staff.
• Also, DHL Supply Chain's medical implant fulfillment operation has obtained over 2x productivity improvements per employee from its adoption of Locus Bots from Locus Robotics Corp. DHL publicly stated that these workers went from 78 picking units per hour to 150 units per hour.
• Robots at present are mainly used in retail and FMCG business in FMCG, mostly in e-commerce. With more than 2.85 million employees in logistics, according to an analysis by the Fraunhofer Institute IIS, the number of employees rose by more than 17% during the last 10 years. This development has been significantly driven by e-commerce and often results in a scarcity of skilled workforce, boosting Piece Picking Robots' demand.
• Further, in March 2021, Lyro Robotics released a robotic fruit packing machine that uses artificial intelligence, which could be adapted to harvesting in rural and regional Australia. The machine uses computer vision to identify a fruit variety and its size, and packs it.
• Also, according to the Bank of America, by 2025, 45% of all manufacturing will be performed by robotic technology. Following this trend, large firms, such as Raymond Limited (an Indian textile major) and Foxconn Technology (a China-based supplier for large technology manufacturers, like Samsung) have replaced (or plan to replace) 10,000 and 60,000 workers, respectively, by incorporating automated technology into their factories. Hence increasing investment in automation drives the market.
• Moreover, The rise in the number of robots in industrial areas will drive the studied market growth. According to IFR, approximately 4,35,000 industrial robots will be shipped worldwide in 2021. Asia/Australia had the most units installed, with an estimated 3,06,000 in 2021. Industrial robot installations in Asia/Australia are expected to reach 370,000 units by 2024.

Key Market TrendsCollaborative Robots to Drive the Market

• Collaborative mobile robots augment humans' work to improve accuracy and lead warehouse associates to correct pick locations and utilize UPC scanning, further reducing human error. According to HMC Investment Securities, it is expected that, by 2025, the global co-bot market size will reach around USD 12.8 billion, and the Piece Picking Robots Market is envisioned to get a boost.
• While the collaborative robot market is relatively new, it's poised for massive growth over the next ten years. Collaborative robots are robots capable of safely working alongside human workers and becoming more sophisticated and useful inside and outside factory settings. Collaborative robots are advancing in capability while simultaneously becoming cheaper and more widely available. These two determinants are vital contributors to the explosive market growth ahead.
• With collaborative piece-picking robots, there is an opportunity to introduce automation into the current pick environment, not disrupt or rearrange the setup, and witness significant productivity gains. For instance, in May 2022, Hyundai plans USD 5 billion investment in the United States by 2025 to further develop mobility technologies in areas like autonomous driving, robotics, and A.I.
• The primary factor driving the market is the Introduction of advanced robots, capable of working with humans in areas like smart parts assembly and electronics component production and assembly, fueling the demand for collaborative robots. According to FMI analysis, in the Collaborative Robots market, the variation between the BPS values has been observed in H1, 2022 - Outlook over H1, 2022 Projected reflects a gain of 99 units, compared to H1, 2021, the market is expected to spike by 81 BPS in H1 -2022.
• Furthermore, in October 2021, Plus One Robotics, a provider of visualization software, and Locus Robotics, a provider of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses and distribution centers, announced a collaboration to create an automated picking solution that combines mobile robots and stationary picking arms. The cutting-edge, cross-platform robotic system is intended to increase productivity in e-commerce fulfillment centers.
• According to HMC Investment Securities, global collaborative robots (co-bot) sales will reach around 134,400 units in the United States, and china is expected to sell the largest units accounting for 2,43,600 by 2025, which will further drive the market growth.
• There are quite a few applications where collaborative robots are deployed: packing, quality testing, material handling, machine tending, assembly, welding, and others. Among these, the material handling segment is expected to experience the most significant growth in collaborative robot installments.
• According to the Robotic Industries Association, one of the main factors contributing to the increasing adoption of collaborative robots is their constantly lowering price tag. With many collaborative robots available for under USD 45K, they are becoming viable outside the factory setting. No matter the setting, the low price tag makes automation investment more accessible and more comfortable to justify.

North America to Hold Significant Share

• The piece picking robots to combine cobots and mobile robots in warehouses and e-commerce fulfillment facilities has benefitted the North American region. Most of the USA robots are imported from Japan and Europe (source: IFR). Although the presence of numerous important robot system integrators.
• The 3PL companies in the region are increasingly looking at different customer profiles to understand the best applications from their perspectives. Also, multiple trends, such as making investments, encouraging hackathons, trend communities, and startup labs, are being observed. For instance, in July 2021, DHL Express, the world's leading express service provider, announced that it would invest more than USD 360 million between 2020 and 2022 in new and expanded facilities in key growth markets throughout the Americas.
• Likewise, at the same time, intending to develop a productive, efficient, and fully flexible automated warehousing environment, global logistics provider DB Schenker in the United States announced a collaboration with IAM Robotics.
• It is also believed the allied industry needed further automation even before COVID-19 casts the issue of labor tenuousness. Most recent data on the average hourly earnings of laborers in the warehouse and storage sector recorded are USD 21.07, as of September 2020 by CES (National). This figure represents a 0.7% decrease from August 2020 rates.
• Specifically, in the agriculture sector, where farmers have spent over USD 34 billion a year on labor in the United States (according to the USDA), the scarcity of H2B visas and an aging worker population has led to a shift to automation. Though it is farfetched on adopting piece pick robots, active developments have been considered.

Competitive Landscape

The Piece Picking Robots Market is moderately competitive and consists of several major players. Few of these players currently dominate the market in terms of market share. These players offer flexible, cost-effective, and efficient mobile Piece Picking Robots, which can automate multiple warehouse services such as palletizing & depalletizing, storage & retrieval, transportation, and packaging. Major players are concentrating on product developments and introducing advanced technologies in the existing product lines to gain a competitive advantage. Prominent players in the market include Plus One Robotics Inc., Kindred Systems Inc, Universal Robots A/S, XYZ Robotics Inc., and Righthand Robotics Inc., among others.

• August 2022- Vanderlande has announced a unique automated piece-picking robot as an addition to its Smart Item Robotics (SIR) portfolio of technologies, which fits with Vanderlande’s strategy of accelerating the use of robotics for warehousing. It features intelligent gripper technology, a sophisticated vision system, and control software.
• April 2021- RightHand Robotics, an automation solutions company, has launched the RightPick 3 item, a handling robot system, the company’s newest generation of the RightPick product suite. The RightPick 3 system is the world’s first autonomous piece-picking solution designed from the ground up to be integrator-friendly with a modular, industrialized hardware design, well-defined software APIs, and international compliance.

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