Roughly 75% of companies plan on using some type of robotic automation within their warehouses by 2027, said Dwight Klappich, vice president of consulting firm Gartner’s Supply Chain Practice.

A study by Gartner, entitled “Hype Cycle for Mobile Robots and Drones, 2023,” released August 17, found that many organizations already use mobile robots and plan on expanding their fleets over the next three years. Smart mobile robot adoption is expected to easily outpace the adoption of drones within supply chains over the next three years, according to a summary of the report.

Gartner believes companies will also begin to use drones in more specific ways, such as inspections of medicines being transported to remote areas.

“Labor shortages and challenges retaining talent, coupled with technology advances such as machine learning and AI, will continue to drive adoption of smart robots,” Klappich said.

Additionally, machine learning is expected to hit mainstream adoption in the next five years. Many “high” impact technologies will mature over the next few years, creating a greater demand for both mobile robots and drones, Klappich said.

Most companies will soon employ heterogeneous fleets of robots — ones of various types that perform different tasks throughout the warehouses. This will eventually require standardization of software that can be integrated into all technologies. As a result, Gartner said, multi-agent orchestration (MAO) platforms were “on the rise” during the 2023 hype cycle.

“In the past year, we’ve seen increased interest in smart robots and MAO platforms as companies are looking to further improve logistics operations, support automation and augment humans in various jobs,” Klappich said. “Rapidly emerging and evolving technologies, like MAO, will enable organizations to leverage heterogeneous fleets of mobile robots to assist with more complex activities, delivering cost savings and productivity benefits.”