Post COVID-19: The Techno-Future With Mobile Robots Fleet Management
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and autonomic guided vehicles (AGVs) were changing the landscape across many industries — including healthcare, factory/warehouse, hospitality, last-mile logistics and others — as the use of automation expanded. At the same time, due to the continued boom of e-commerce and increasing customer expectations for faster and cheaper delivery, AMR and AGV demand continues to surge, pushing the mobile robot market revenues from €16.75B in 2018 to a staggering €48.5B by 2023, at a CAGR of 23.71% during the forecast period.
In 2018, more than 20,000 AMR robots and around 110,700 AGV units were sold globally. Thanks to persistent product innovation in both hardware — like active binocular 3D cameras & fish eye cameras, ultrasonic sensors — and software — such as fleet management solutions and cloud services, the number of AMR shipments are expected to reach 350K after 4 years, meanwhile, sales of AGVs will nearly triple by 2024.
We are living through unprecedented times. The impact of the novel COVID-19 disease has reverberated every corner of the world. As of June 11, 2020, the outbreak had been confirmed in around 210 countries and territories, infecting 7,459,848 human beings and taking 419,048 lives. The number is still growing and the duration of the pandemic is still difficult to predict, causing profound, long-term socio-economic consequences.
Indicative current reduction in economic activity in the euro area was estimated to be around 27%, with art, entertainment, and recreation industry’s activity dropped the most by 84%. According to the OECD, global gross domestic product (GDP) loss this year due to the economic shutdown, in the worst case scenario — which a second wave of infections, with renewed lock-downs, hits before the end of 2020, will be -7.6%, compared to 2019.
Social distancing regulations, self-isolation enforcements, and travel restrictions have impacted negatively on the unemployment rate, across all economic sectors. McKinsey has estimated that up to 57M US jobs are at risk, while in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, a staggering 26% of total employment are vulnerable to the crisis.
“We estimate that 42% of recent pandemic-induced lay-offs will result in permanent job loss,” says Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a leading expert on hiring practices, job loss, and the effects of economic uncertainty.
COVID-19 Shifts Global Consumer Behaviour
Studies showed that the coronavirus outbreak has driven consumers indoor — and online. In fact, COVID-19 has recruited tens of thousands of new e-shoppers who are likely to persist with the habit over the long term, long after lockdown has become a distant memory.
It has been reported that e-commerce across Europe has more than doubled during the pandemic. Surveyed shoppers claimed that their online shopping tendency this year increased by 34.9%, compared to 2019. Another research made by Coresight Research indicates that 14.4% of online purchasers said they started shopping online for groceries due to the pandemic.
The global online grocery shopping sector is set to grow 33% in 2020 to reach an estimated value of €18.9B, up from €14.3B in 2019, according to Mintel. Recently, Salesforce published a new “Global Shopping Index” report, which revealed the number of unique digital shoppers rose 40% year-over-year (YoY). Digital shoppers drove 20% revenue growth, outperformed the pre-global pandemic 2019 holiday shopping season by 9%.
As a result, retailers, manufacturers and supply chains have turned their attention to mobile robots to improve their efficiency and capacities to meet the demands, while reducing direct human contact for social distancing.
A poll by the American Chamber of Commerce Shanghai pointed out that the biggest challenge in the coming weeks was to have enough staff to run the full production lines in factories. This reality has made ramping up robotic automation growingly appealing.
Furthermore, statistics show that consumers seem to have a better understanding of the roles of robots in a Post-COVID world. A survey done by Interactions LLC found that nearly three quarters (73%) of the respondents would choose to order online if the package was delivered by a robot rather than by a human, and 33% said they are now more comfortable with robots in grocery stores.
“The epidemic made people aware of the fragility of human beings,” Liu Zhiyong, CEO of ZhenRobotics said.
“Robots can make up for this vulnerability and provide services people can trust,” he said. “Trust in robots has been enhanced dramatically.”
Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics
Undoubtedly, mobile robots can help deal with massive staffing shortages, and the need for social distancing. In many parts of the world, mobile robots have been helping deliver medical supplies within healthcare environments or essential goods to communities, and also assist in disinfecting facilities like hospitals, monitoring and surveillance. Within warehouses that support online shops, robots are also used to automate and streamline order fulfilment.
Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics, in the second in a series of roundtables hosted by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), emphasised that “We are seeing an explosion in certain segments of the economy right now. We are literally shipping by air-freighting bots all over the world. … We’re also seeing a lot of retail accounts shuttering right now. And as a result, they are ramping up facilities right now to handle the extra volume that they’re generating from e-commerce. We’re also in conversations with grocery stores, where they are looking to take facilities that were traditional grocery stores and making them into (distribution centres.)”
Despite the high demand, it does seem like the industry has not been able to escape the impact of the pandemic. Delays in both new projects launched and commissioned due to lockdown measures will eliminate nearly half a million euros of AGV and AMR revenues and almost €2B of warehouse automation revenue this year.
However, the latest forecast still shows a positive number, with 2023 mobile robots revenues will be more than €0.5B higher than they would have been if the pandemic had not occurred, and warehouse automation revenue to reach €46.3B in 2023 up from the €42.7B predicted prior to the pandemic.
The increased adoption of e-commerce moves to local manufacturing and desire to reduce dependency on human labour will all help drive this change.
Venture capitalists have been seeing fuelling the growth of mobile robots manufacturers. A month ago, at least three different companies were funded — Brain Corp. successfully raised €32M, ForwardX Robotics with €13.4M, and nearly €25.5M for Neolix.
The global fleet management software market for mobile robots is anticipated to gain impetus from the increasing focus on robots fleet effectiveness. The fleet management software market itself overall is expected to surge from €12.5B in 2018 to €41.5B by 2026, registering a CAGR of 16.52% over the forecast period.
Fleet management allows companies to organise, manage, track, and maintain their vehicles — from ships, cars to mobile robots — to keep all their operations running smoothly and productively, reducing cost effectively, while minimising risks.
The rising adoption of mobile robots in the past few months has been a major factor to drive growth of the fleet management software market for mobile robots. Despite the substantial market growth, there still seems to be a lack of dedicated universal solutions, which enable several robot operators to monitor robots from different manufacturers, to carry out tasks between multiple applications, all at the same time. Currently, in the market, there are several available options for mobile robots, but mainly are exclusive to the manufacturers, and missing many standard features and functionalities.
The interest in mobile robots staggeringly increases, the overarching reality is that it is the future. They only need to be fine-tuned. The question is, how to tune them?
About Meili Robots
Meili Robots is developing the next-generation of mobile robots fleet management, called Meili FMS. A universal digital solution, an all-in-one platform that is capable of handling different kinds of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). Enable traffic control, empower interoperability and facilitate automated task allocation — all via intuitive UI. Check our website meilirobots.com/product to learn about our products. Contact us to find out more: info@meilirobots.com.
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