DHL tests robots for potential warehouse roll-out

DHL has announced that it is testing two types of robot in one of its warehouses, the two models, known as Baxter and Sawyer, will assist staff with handling package assembly and packaging.
 

“Historically, the distribution environment has been difficult to automate using traditional industrial robots, which do not respond well to variability,” explained Matthias Heutger, Senior Vice President for strategy, marketing and innovation at DHL.

“In our recently published DHL Trend Report “Robotics in Logistics”, we found that 80 percent of logistics facilities today are still manual due to the complexity of the operations. As technology improves however, the logistics industry is benefiting from the adoption of collaborative robots to improve efficiency.”

 “Baxter and Sawyer robots are some of the most advanced collaborative robots on the market, and we plan to deploy them in a variety of packaging and inventory tasks that will allow us to use our employees for higher value work,” added Adrian Kumar, Vice President of solutions design North America at DHL Supply Chain.

“By deploying these robots to work in tandem with humans, we can ensure our production lines are adjusting to changes and running more efficiently year-round.”

Markus Kückelhaus, vice president innovation and trend research at DHL Customer Solutions and Innovation, added: “The logistics industry has been unable to leverage smart, collaborative robots until recently, and the high performance Sawyer robot is changing the game in what we can and cannot automate.”
 

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SOURCE: [Air Cargo News]