What a difference a decade makes. “If you think back 10 years ago when warehouse robotics was in its infancy, we were all focused as an industry on getting our solution off the ground, proving that the concept works,” says Gina Chung, vice president corporate development at Locus Robotics. Now, 10 years later, Locus alone has deployed more than 12,000 robots at 270 sites. 

Since robotic automation has reached a level of relative maturity, it’s time to talk about interoperability, Chung says. That means taking robots that were only used for one function — picking, for example — and seeing what else they can do within the four walls of a warehouse. “It could also imply operating with different robotic systems from different vendors as well,” explains Chung. 

That presents challenges, however. The most obvious one is standardization. “You don't want 10 robots speaking 10 different languages,” says Chung. “As an industry, we have a responsibility to drive standardization, and to use common protocols and interfaces.” An example is the robot operating system, a set of open-source software libraries and tools for building robot applications — essentially forming a common operating system that many robotic systems utilize today. “We're able to make interoperability a heck of a lot easier than everyone developing their own operating systems,” says Chung.

Another challenge with interoperability is the integration itself. That can be very costly, Chung says, and also very complex, so the trick is to achieve it in a cost-effective way that drives return on investment for the customer. 

But the gains to be made are significant. “The advantage is that today you might have a site where they've automated the picking, but downstream the sortation is still manual. Or it's not optimized,” says Chung. “If you're able to automate the sortation, you can deploy that separately. But if you actually integrate the two solutions together, you can optimize both systems.”