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

Market Overview

The global piece picking robots market was valued at USD 148.1 million in 2020 and it is expected to reach USD 2870.13 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of 62.5%, during the period of 2021-2026. With the requirement for e-commerce and product assortment quickly growing, the demand for piece-picking solutions has grown substantially. Additionally, labor deficits in the logistics industry, including securing employees for ordinary tasks such as picking, have become a hurdle for warehouse managers.

• According to inVia Robotics, Inc., the amount of time that 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.
• 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.
• COVID-19 has boosted the sales of automated solutions and thus also increased its logistics requirements enormously. Though the supply chain has been disrupted due to lockdown but the industry has grown significantly. The Warehouse order pickups are considered as the most time-consuming part of the supply chain, with picking robots promising to shorten it. Mobile piece pickers thus, offer can replace the number of hours that workers spend moving around the warehouse.In June 2020, Robotic fulfilment vendor Kindred Inc. said that the clothing retailer Gap Inc. had purchased 73 of its automated piece-picking robots in an effort to meet the increasing demand for online orders and employee safety due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scope of the Report

Piece-picking robots are competent in helping workers, by eliminating the necessity for labor to be devoted to repetitive and critical tasks. These are the software-driven, hardware-enabled solution that handles the core task of picking and placing individual items as part of a wide range of workflows and processes​. Piece-picking robots improve performance and efficiency in e-commerce order fulfillment and intralogistics.

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Key Market Trends

Collaborative Robots to Drive the Market

• Collaborative mobile robots augment humans' work to improve accuracy and by leading warehouse associates to correct pick locations and to utilize UPC scanning, further reducing human error. As, according to HMC Investment Securities, it is expected that, by 2025, the global co-bot market size will reach around USD 12.8 billion, 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 10 years. Collaborative robots are robots capable of safely working alongside human workers and becoming more sophisticated and useful inside and outside of 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.
• DHL has beenone of the early adopters of collaborative robots in its warehouse. In 2018, DHL Supply Chain announced a plan to invest USD 300 million inro emerging technologies in its North American operations. They rolled out an accelerated digitalization program that identified 14 target technologies – seven of which involve collaborative robotics – that can be fast-tracked into customers' operations.
• There are quite a few applications where collaborative robots are being 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, though, the low price tag makes automation investment more accessible and more comfortable to justify.

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