What are the latest trends in India’s supply chain and manufacturing sector?
Ans. There have been some key triggers in last 5 years which have changed India’s supply chain and manufacturing sector, such as the rise of E-Commerce and it’s spread into every nuke and corner of the country after internet data revolution, growth of organized retail in major towns and cities, implementation of GST which led to the consolidation of small warehouses into mega distribution centers, the high real-estate prices in cities which forced the consumer warehouses to outside the city & the supply and demand fluctuations. These triggers necessitated a flexible supply chain to accommodate the demand surges & reliable warehousing operations that help in fulfilling the requirement within stipulated time and in an accurate manner. As operations scale up, it is critical to improve the productivity of people working in the warehouses and factories and people are also becoming more conscious about doing more productive & meaningful work. So, in line with that the demand for automation solutions such as autonomous mobile robotics, automated guided vehicles, picking technologies like Pick to Light, Pick by Voice and Pick by Vision based systems, warehouse softwares etc is increasing as these can improve the productivity drastically vis-a-vis manual operations. Also the packaging robots, once constrained to the assembly line are making way into the warehouses for different applications such as bin picking, pick & place, and then mobile robots which are used for multiple applications of material transfer inside the warehouses. More importantly, during the last 5 years due to the technological advancements, automation has emerged as a necessity more than a luxury.
How Dynamo, Addverb’s AMR can work alongside humans in your warehouse and do material movement?
Ans. Dynamo, our in-house built autonomous mobile robot is used for material movement of different payloads from 100 kg to 1000 kg and works in collaboration with humans. It moves at a speed of 1.5 m/s and is guided by LIDAR based natural navigation. Its 2-stage sensor-based navigation mechanism, one to slow down and another to stop the robot in case any obstacles/human intervention in the environment, coupled with the warning &alarm signals makes it very safe to work along with humans. The robot’s movement is completely autonomous where in the map of the entire layout is fed at the beginning by taking it for a walk& then it starts working within it by finding out the shortest and less congested path for a given mission (movement operation). This entire operational set up procedure takes less than 20 min & a fleet of bots will be ready to perform material handling operations.
Some of the exceptional features of Dynamo, that make it a must-have for material movement are: