Robotics 2.0 Is Knocking: Here's What It Means

By 2020, we may see robots taking on tasks that were never thought to have the potential to be automated.

- Vikrant Yadav

Being a part of an industry that is expected to grow four-fold in the next four years in like being on a swing only goes up. This is India’s e-commerce industry. According to a May 2016 ASSOCHAM- Forrester study, India's e-commerce revenue will jump from US $30 billion in 2016 to US $120 billion in 2020, growing at 51 percent per annum, the highest in the world.

Smartphone savvy millennials looking for a superior experience, competitive pricing and shopping on the move seem the surface reasons for this massive growth. However, there is something beneath the surface: warehousing costs for an e-commerce player can be as much as 25 percent of their total supply chain costs. Therefore, it is essential for e-commerce and logistics companies to automate their warehouses by deploying robotic systems to make their supply chains more effective and efficient.

With selling propositions like same-day delivery, four-hour delivery, the level of automation at warehouses becomes the key differentiator for e-commerce players. Think of a warehouse the size of a football stadium with over 10,000 different types of products. Manual sorting of shipments based on delivery destinations can be cumbersome, inaccurate, and inefficient. Instead, a robotic sorting solution can read the barcodes on the packets, and sort them according to customized parameters such as first-in-first-out, delivery address, same-day delivery etc., thereby, speeding up the process almost 10 times, with higher accuracy.