Robotics and automation technologies are quite common throughout the factory and manufacturing sectors, especially with industries in the service sector facing a critical labor shortage accompanying the aging of society and declining birthrate in recent years. Against this backdrop, Toshiba recognizes the potential market in distribution warehouses, and in sorting centers for intelligent robotics and logistics solutions to reduce the burden of workers and realize sustainable growth.
Today most robotic solutions are used to perform predetermined and repetitive tasks in factory automation. At Toshiba’s Corporate Research and Development Center, further research is taking place to realize robots that can be integrated into supply chains and that can take on more human-oriented tasks.
For example, when it comes to sorting centers not all packages are equal in size, shape or weight, and Toshiba has developed next generation intelligent robotics that are increasingly able to demonstrate “human” capabilities such as sensing, dexterity, and memory. By incorporating certain technologies such as a control algorithm, articulated mechanism with vacuum type gripping pads and package recognition technology, the processes of depalletizing work, gripping packages of various shapes and accurately detecting the position of target packages have been automated.
Adoption is expected to accelerate over the near term given the expected improvement in efficiencies robotics can bring along with the explosive growth of the e-commerce sector.
