Core Distribution Applications will be the Foundation, but AMRs Seeing Success in Other Applications as Well

Interest in so-called Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in distribution remains high, driven by the on-going warehouse labor shortage and with that rising costs and management headaches.

Supply Chain Digest Says... The report notes there are many vendors specializing in each market vertical. Companies such as MiR, Omron, Otto Motors, and ABB tackle intralogistics within manufacturing. What do you say? Click here to send us your comments Click here to see reader feedback

The market for AMRs drooped a bit in that last two years, but one major research firm is predicting rapid growth in unit and dollar sales through the end of the decade.

What is an AMR? As the name suggests AMRs are a type of a robot that move goods or shipping containers without human intervention, either as a general transport function or to support a collaborative picking process, where (greatly simplifying) robots and humans work together to fulfill orders.

Now, the analysts at ABI Research forecast last week that unit sales of AMRs globally will rise at a near 25% compound annual growth through 2030.

ABI estimates mobile robot shipments to grow from 547,000 units in 2023 to 2.79 million by 2030, a CAGR of a strong 24.1%.

Accordingly, AMR sales revenue for mobile robots will grow from $18 billion to $124 billion by 2030, a CAGR of 23.6%, the research firm added.

Interestingly, ABI’s research finds that while today AMRs are generally deployed for distribution applications, they are increasingly being applied d in manufacturing, last-mile delivery, agriculture, and healthcare.

“Mobile robots are a very valuable category of robot which have completely transformed warehousing and logistics in recent years,” says George Chowdhury, a robotics industry analyst at ABI, adding that “For material handling alone, mobile robots offer enterprises transformative efficiency improvements. Driven by the evolution of supporting technologies such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), mobile robots can be deployed in diverse and dynamic environments, presenting new horizons to stakeholders and bringing efficiency improvements to under-automated economic sectors such as agriculture and healthcare.”

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The report notes there are many vendors specializing in each market vertical. Companies such as MiR, Omron, Otto Motors, and ABB tackle intralogistics within manufacturing; firms such as Zebra, Locus, and Safelog target distribution; Simbe and Brain Corp address retail; and Starship is targeting the last-mile delivery market.

“Mobile robots will remain the most popular form of robot, and shipments will continue to increase across economies as the benefits of augmenting existing business practices with automation become clear to decision-makers,” the report concludes.

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