In part 1 of the series, I discussed some of the guiding design principles for the next generation of warehouse robotics start-ups, including scalability, resilience, ease of integration, and ROI. Building on these principles, several new or re-imagined robotics categories are seeing significant investor interest and market adoption. Each category is fundamentally changing how warehouses deliver operational efficiency, invest in technology, and perform workforce planning.

Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS): Supply chains are increasingly being built around local micro-fulfillment centers that ensure faster delivery times and lower-cost operations. This is particularly true in the grocery industry, where delivery times are most critical. These centers often deploy automated storage and retrieval systems that combine high-density goods storage with automated item retrieval using a built-in gantry system. Providers such as Autostore, Attabotics, and Fabric leverage machine learning to deliver higher throughput solutions in a much smaller footprint than traditional AS/RS providers. These solutions are adept at optimizing both the strategy for storing goods and the strategy for retrieving goods to minimize order fulfillment time. For example, Autostore’s Cube Storage Automation System can store up to 15,000 SKUs within 604 square-meters.

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs): Movement of goods between shipping, receiving, and storage locations in warehouse facilities is often enabled by automated guided vehicles. Traditional AGV solutions travel along predefined routes, typically painted lines on the floor. However, newer providers such as Fetch, Vecna, and Otto Motors are leveraging autonomous navigation capability to provide much greater adaptability for changing use cases and routes, resulting in faster deployment time and greater dynamic movement. Fetch has turnkey and extensible systems that safely find, track, and move anything from parts to pallets in warehouses, factories, and distribution centers

Inventory drones: Modern warehouse efficiency requires high-quality data on the movement of goods in and out of the warehouse. Traditional methods of inventory data collection are commonly human-centric and infrequent, leading to errors and limited real-time visibility of what is in a warehouse at any given time. Companies such as Vimaan, Gather, Flytbase, and Ware are building autonomous inventory management drones. Gather’s drones can accurately scan and catalog aisles 15x faster than humans, 30x cheaper and with zero downtime.

Parcel-handling Robots: Goods and parcels typically enter and exit a warehouse through a parcel-handling process. Unloading, unpacking and re-loading completed orders into a sortation system or delivery truck are requirements in nearly every distribution facility. Parcel handling is a labor-intensive job with high rates of turnover. Handling larger boxes and packages has a unique set of requirements that companies such as Pickle Robot, Plus One Robotics, and Dexterity are beginning to solve. Advanced technology and motion planning allows these systems to move parcels in production environments, designed to work alongside their human counterparts and operating collaboratively.

Pick-Assist Robots: As the scale of distribution facilities continues to grow, collecting customer orders has become extremely labor-intensive. Workers walk upwards of 10 miles a shift picking items off shelves in the order fulfillment process, expected to collect an order every 33 seconds. Not only is this process highly inefficient, as most of the time is spent walking from location to location, it can also lead to frequent worker injuries. Companies such as Locus Robotics and 6 River Systems are providing robots that replace unproductive walking time with autonomously navigated goods carts. Workers can focus on transferring goods from storage shelves to carts, and the robot does the ‘walking’. Worker productivity is enhanced by 2–3x, reducing dependence on labor and the risk of worker injuries.

Piece-picking Robots: Given the prevalence of the ‘piece-picking’ activity throughout the warehouse, many view this use case as the ‘holy grail’ of warehouse robotics. Order fulfillment requires the handling of individual items at various points of the fulfillment process, ultimately resulting in the packaging of goods in an individualized order. Picking up items and packaging might sound like a trivial task for humans, but it’s deceptively difficult for machines to efficiently calculate how to grab the next “thing.” RightHand Robotics, Kindred, Berkshire Grey, and Soft Robotics are building robotics solutions leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and special grippers to pick and transfer individual items, often from highly unstructured scenarios — e.g. miscellaneous goods in a storage bin.

Enabling Solutions: Along with various use-case specific offerings, there is also significant innovation around the enabling technologies that will accelerate the deployment of new robotics solutions. Companies like Veo Robotics, Scalable Robotics, Freedom Robotics, and Ready Robotics are creating tools to simplify the implementation of customer-specific use cases and are also making it making it easier to deploy solutions that can safely operate in the presence of people.

The pace of automation adoption across the industry is accelerating as offerings reach maturity and buyers feel increased pressure to improve operational efficiency. The global warehouse automation market is already worth over $10 billion today, and it is expected to double in size over the next 5 years as new technologies continue to see adoption. The combination of capabilities and guiding principles will significantly expand the scope of automation available, lower barriers to adoption, and enhance the potential for operational efficiency.