Sebastian Koehler
PhD Student
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
PhD Student
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
The Hare and the Tortoise of Automation: Design Principles for Robotic Picking in Picker-To-Parts-Systems
Logistics and Intralogistics SystemsPersistent labor shortages and rising cost pressures are forcing the warehousing industry toward higher levels of automation (Boysen et al., 2019; Winkelhaus & Grosse, 2020; Vijayakumar & Sgarbossa, 2021). Order picking, which still accounts for the largest share of operational warehouse costs, is at the center of this transformation. Since approximately 80% of all order-picking systems in Western European warehouses are picker-to-parts systems (De Koster et al., 2007), retrofitting these existing layouts with robotic technology is particularly attractive: it requires substantially lower investment than building a new parts-to-picker installation from scratch and can be integrated incrementally without major structural changes to the building, racking, or process design (Vijayakumar & Sgarbossa, 2024; Azadeh et al., 2019).
