Take aways from Pro­MAT 2019

The most impor­tant trade fair for mate­r­ial han­dling and logis­tics just wrapped up recently in McCormick Place, Chicago. With more than 45.000 par­tic­i­pants from 115 coun­tries the Pro­MAT in Chicago is the lead­ing logis­tics event in North and South Amer­ica. And for the first time in Mag­a­zi­nos his­tory, we have made the big step over the ocean and exhib­ited our mobile pick­ing robot TORU within this community. 

After exhibit­ing our robots mostly in Ger­many and other Euro­pean coun­tries, we have now made the move to the Pro­MAT and it has exceeded our expec­ta­tions. At our booth, the shoe-pick­ing robot TORU demon­strated how the process looks like in a real ware­house, work­ing along­side curi­ous vis­i­tors. Our robot has shown again that he is capa­ble of pick­ing in an envi­ron­ment with lots of exter­nal influ­ences, like inter­ested vis­i­tors step­ping into its dri­ving path at our booth or manip­u­lat­ing objects the robot was about to pick next.

Exhibit­ing at such a big fair, we were to some extend ner­vous and curi­ous for all the unknown cir­cum­stances that we could encounter. Now after the fair, being back in Ger­many, we reviewed not only what we saw but also what we heard from our vis­i­tors at our booth and other exhibitors at the Pro­MAT. And now one key mes­sage stood out to us:
Robot­ics will play a key role in e‑commerce!

The Pro­MAT 2019 has proven once again that robot­ics will play a key role in the automa­tion of logis­tics in the future. Although not a lot of com­pletely new robotic tech­nol­ogy has been intro­duced, the Pro­MAT par­tic­i­pants could see that the robots exhib­ited are get­ting more mature and present in the field of logis­tics. In addi­tion, we expe­ri­enced that our robot TORU is still in a pretty unique posi­tion in the field of AMRs (Advanced Mobile Robots), because there are not a lot of robots that nav­i­gate freely and han­dle objects autonomously with­out the inter­ven­tion of the human. And if we then look at increas­ing labor short­age and high wages in the field of logis­tics raised by big play­ers in the mar­ket, there is an increas­ing demand for flex­i­ble and cost effi­cient solutions. 

To sum it up, exhibit­ing at Pro­MAT for the first time, we could not only gen­er­ate inter­est­ing leads, we could also gain new amaz­ing insights into the e‑commerce and shoe mar­ket of the United States. It has been a very suc­cess­ful show and it was great to meet new peo­ple within the indus­try. We will con­tinue estab­lish­ing the brand and tech­nol­ogy of Mag­a­zino in the United States even more and look­ing for­ward meet­ing you at MODEX 2020!