The trend of Indoor Mobile Robots encompasses the various types of portable robot that fulfill tasks primarily inside facilities without direct input from human operators. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) follow predetermined visible or invisible paths, while their next-generation successors, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), use real-time path planning and can more freely move around obstacles.
Mobile automation has developed through 2D lidar autonomy to 3D visual autonomy, which is currently maturing, significantly advancing AMRs in various applications and boosting uptake. AMR sales in the logistics industry are expected to grow by 31% per year between 2020 and 2023.
Today, we are seeing more and more applications for indoor mobile robots in logistics. Especially in markets with higher labor costs, indoor mobile robots are being used extensively in order fulfillment. In other areas such as automated mobile manipulation however, the technology is not yet widely marketable and will take a few more years to achieve commercialization on an industry-wide level. As soon as indoor mobile robots can be deployed at scale, they have enormous potential to reduce cost and increase efficiency within operations. Therefore this trend is considered highly impactful for the logistics industry.