Mark Richardson, chief executive officer of Ocado Intelligent Automation, visualizes the future of warehouse automation — including the possibility of fully autonomous "dark" warehouses.

In the warehouse automation sector, Richardson sees a continued trend toward scarcity of labor, and higher costs for those who are available to work. As a result, an increasing number of warehouses are thinking about automating — even those relatively low-cost operations that had never before contemplated the notion. There’s also “a steady march toward increased automation among those buying solutions,” he says, as facilities edge closer to becoming “lights-out” warehouses with no humans on the scene at all.

There’s strong demand for automated storage and retrieval (AS/RS) and autonomous mobile robots (AMR), although for the moment those two areas of technology remain separate. Richardson sees many opportunities to combine them into a single package. Indeed, he believes the winners in this space will be those who can come to market with just one consolidated offering.

At the moment, by contrast, the proliferation of point solutions, which optimize discrete tasks, are failing to yield that same result for the operation at large. For that reason, the two automated systems are “best optimized under a single software umbrella,” Richardson says.

Robotic picking also has a bright future, although it has done relatively little so far to disrupt the human picking arena. “It’s still relatively difficult to make a strong economic case for both vendor and customer,” Richardson says, adding that progress will come when automated picking systems are integrated with the rest of the warehouse.

The so-called dark warehouse seems like the ultimate end-game, but Richardson believes that the days of completely human-free operations on a broad scale “are still a little bit away from us. “It’s not absolutely necessary to remove the last few humans.”