In 2022, the autonomous mobile robot market was valued at $8.65 billion and is expected to grow to an impressive $23.69 billion by 2028.
These machines are gaining popularity year after year across different industries and continue to revolutionize material handling, offering a way to mitigate the effects of labor shortages, rising costs, safety concerns, and more.
AMRs are a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution that can fill worker gaps, boost productivity, and free up existing workers to focus on safer, more rewarding tasks.
In fact, AMRs have been shown to:
However, as businesses increasingly turn to AMRs to address these challenges, the effective management of AMR deployment becomes crucial. Managing an AMR deployment is not just about setting up the robots and letting them run. It involves a strategic approach that considers various factors, including assessing the specific needs of your facility, selecting the right AMRs, conducting simulations, and ensuring proper system integration.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to get the most out of our AMR investment. We’ll explore the AMR deployment process and what to consider before deploying your fleet.
What are the signs that indicate your business might need AVs?
The first step in the AMR deployment process is to assess your facility's specific needs. Begin by pinpointing the challenges you face, such as bottlenecks in product transportation, high labor turnover, slow order fulfillment speeds, and damaged inventory.
For instance, at Cyngn, we’ve had a customer tell us, “If we could hire 500 people tomorrow, we would, but we can't even hire 10 so we work every shift understaffed.”
Understanding your unique challenges will help you identify where AMRs can have the most impact on your business. To pinpoint these areas, you can collaborate with your provider to conduct a comprehensive site survey that reveals where AMRs can be most beneficial and ensure the technology aligns with your goals.
Some other potential needs may AMRs include:
Selecting the right AMRs for your facility is crucial. This step involves evaluating various AMR types based on their features and compatibility with your facility’s already identified needs. Your organization should look into factors such as the type of tasks the robots will perform, whether that's order picking or transporting pallets of goods.
Evaluate the capabilities of different AMRs, such as load capacity, navigation systems, and compatibility with existing equipment and environment. Do you have complex layouts or tight spaces to navigate through?
Plus, consider whether the AMR seamlessly integrates into your existing workflows or if it requires special infrastructure. For instance, Cyngn’s autonomous tugger operates efficiently using a digital map of your environment, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure.
Lastly, it is also important to choose AMRs that offer flexibility to adapt to future needs and changes in your operations.
Common AMRs, with different capabilities, include:
Once you’ve assessed your site and business goals, it’s important to create a detailed plan for how to implement automation in your facility. This plan should include clear goals and timelines, such as increasing production speed and reducing delivery times by three times over six months, for example, along with the steps that will be required to achieve this goal.
This includes assessing current capabilities, identifying areas for improvement, and aligning with your business goals. By setting specific objectives and deadlines, you can effectively monitor progress and ensure that automation initiatives meet your operational targets.
Next, a financial analysis is key to determining the economic feasibility of the investment. This includes taking into account current operational and labor costs in addition to up-front costs associated with buying the AMRs themselves.
You can also use an ROI calculator to get tangible figures for planning your deployment. Estimate the return on investment (ROI) by comparing these costs with potential benefits, such as reduced labor expenses, increased productivity, and lower operational costs. This approach ensures that your decision is financially sound and aligned with your business objectives.
Calculate your potential ROI here.
Now it is time to actually implement the AMR software and the vehicle itself. This step involves working with a team to set up the AMR’s control software and ensuring it seamlessly communicates with your existing systems, like warehouse management or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. For example, after installing the software on your AMRs, you might need to integrate it with your warehouse management system (WMS) to enable these vehicles to perform inventory management tasks as they arise in real-time.
Proper integration allows the AMR to operate efficiently within your workflows, managing tasks like inventory tracking, order fulfillment, and real-time data sharing. For instance, integrating the AMR with a fleet management system can optimize routing and task assignments across multiple robots, enhancing overall productivity.
The next step may include working with a provider to conduct simulations.
A new way of doing this is leveraging digital twin technology. By creating virtual replicas of AMRs in real-world scenarios, you can test its performance in a controlled setting, helping to identify any potential issues in a before actual deployment to test their impact on internal logistics and intralogistics, so that you make better decisions on how to utilize AMRs in real-life and identify areas for optimization. Digital twins can contribute to enhanced efficiency and operational reliability in autonomous vehicle systems by:
Finally, you're ready to deploy. This involves working with your deployment team to integrate them into your facility, ensuring they are ready to perform their designated tasks. Proper deployment includes setting up the necessary infrastructure and ensuring that all systems are synchronized so that each robot can perform their designated tasks.
However, with our vehicles, there’s no need for special infrastructure, making it easy to integrate them into your existing workflows right away. While some AMRs can take weeks or even months to deploy, “Cyngn can launch a demo in just 3 days or a full deployment within 2 weeks”, according to Kyle Stanhouse, Cyngn’s Director of Engineering. Our deployment team will come on site to ensure smooth integration and adoption of the technology by your team.
While you may have already conducted simulations, thorough testing in the actual environment is also key to make sure that your AMRs meet operational requirements. It essentially helps validate the simulation results. This involves running the AMR on-site under real conditions to ensure it performs as expected. Maybe this includes evaluating its navigation accuracy, docking precision, and localization capabilities. For example, you might simulate various operational conditions, such as pallet stacking tasks in different parts of a facility with multiple layouts.
At Cyngn, we take care of this crucial step for you. We'll visit your facility to create a high-precision, digital map of your domain. From there, we layer in the rules of the road to ensure that your vehicles will follow the same lanes, speed limits, and other cautions that your human drivers do.
Learn more about our mapping process here
Resistance to change is one of the biggest barriers organizations can face when it comes to investing in automation.
Therefore, proper training on operational procedures, safety protocols, and troubleshooting techniques while fostering open communication to ensure a smooth transition.
That’s why at Cyngn, we provide robust training and support services to ensure you maximize the value of your investment and deliver value fast. “Cyngn brings autonomous driving capabilities to vehicles that organizations already use in their warehouses and manufacturing sites. When they drive themselves, they become even easier to use.” - Jacob Green, Cyngn’s Senior Manager of Business Development.
Once your AMRs are deployed, ongoing support is crucial to ensure their optimal performance. Regular maintenance, software updates, and troubleshooting assistance help keep your robots running smoothly.
That’s why it is important to have a dedicated support team to ensure that potential issues are addressed, minimizing downtime.
This further includes regular maintenance to extend the lifespan of your AMRs and sustain high levels of productivity.
One great benefit of robotics is that they provide greater visibility into operations, including performance metrics and KPIs related to improving operational efficiency. For instance, AMRs often come with analytic features, which enable you to track and monitor how fast tasks are being completed and identify areas for optimization.
Over time and as your operations expand, your organization may want to consider scaling up.
For example, after a successful initial deployment, you may want to consider deploying AMRs in other areas of your warehouse, or even scaling up during peak periods to meet seasonal demand. Alternatively, maybe you are interested in tackling new operational challenges.
By strategically scaling, you can maintain efficiency and productivity while accommodating increased workloads.
Before deploying AMRs, it's essential to review your current legacy systems, such as inventory and task management software, to ensure compatibility with the new technology. Consider whether your existing infrastructure can seamlessly integrate with AMR solutions or if upgrades are necessary.
Taking the time to align your systems with the requirements of AMRs will help streamline the deployment process and set the stage for successful integration.
It’s important to assess current workflows to identify areas where AMRs can bring significant improvements. Evaluating how such tasks are currently performed or where additional workers would be needed to assist can help pinpoint inefficiencies.
Properly mapping out these interactions helps in tailoring the deployment strategy and ensuring smooth and efficient operations.
Learn more about common AMR workflows here.
You want to make sure that your network supports the integration and operation of your AMRs, particularly that it can handle the data and communication needs of the robots, including real-time updates and remote monitoring.
This might involve upgrading Wi-Fi or 5G service to maintain seamless connectivity. Without a reliable network or remote operation capabilities, AMRs may struggle to or experience an inability to perform.
Conducting a cost-benefit analysis is crucial before deploying AMRs to ensure the investment aligns with your facility’s goals. Evaluate the initial costs, like implementation and maintenance, and compare it with the potential benefits, such as increased efficiency and reduced labor costs.
For instance, consider the potential savings from fewer labor hours and fewer errors against the upfront costs of purchasing and integrating AMRs.
This analysis will help you understand the long-term financial gains and validate whether the investment aligns with your financial goals.
It is also important to identify and mitigate potential risks associated with an AMR deployment by conducting a thorough risk assessment. Analyze factors such as system malfunctions, integration issues, and the impact on current operations.
For example, what is the risk of potential downtime if technical issues were to arise?
By understanding and preparing for these risks proactively, you can develop strategies to address them and ensure a smoother deployment.
Your organization should also evaluate the operational flexibility of your AMRs by assessing how adaptable the AMRs are to changes in workflow or task requirements.
Ensure that the robots can handle variations in workload, different types of tasks, and can be easily reprogrammed or adjusted as needed.
This evaluation will help gauge how AMRs can enhance your facility's adaptability and overall performance.
Safety is a top priority, so effective traffic coordination is essential to ensure that your AMRs move smoothly and safely through your facility. When you are implementing your vehicles, you will be able to work with your provider to set up clear pathways and operational zones to guide both robots and human workers.
This proper planning, as well as implementing real-time monitoring systems, helps to minimize the risk of collisions and injuries to both workers and assets.
At Cyngn, we understand that deploying a fleet of AMRs can be daunting and that every business has its own set of needs. That is why our implementation process is designed to meet you where you are.
Our team of deployment experts will assess your operation and determine the best use case for our autonomous vehicle technology.
We will work with you to create a customized plan that fits your specific requirements and helps you get the most out of our solutions. And because we bring autonomous capabilities to vehicles that you are already familiar with, your entire team can get trained before lunch.
Cyngn’s four-step deployment process includes:
Learn more about our full deployment process here.
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