To Örebro University

The transfer of research results to market-ready products is often a costly and time-consuming process. In order to generate successful products, researchers must cooperate with industrial companies; both the industrial and academic partners need to have a detailed understanding of the requirements of all parties concerned. Academic researchers need to identify the performance indicators for technical systems within a business environment and be able to apply them.

Inservice logistics today, nearly all standardized mass goods are unloaded manually with one reason for this being the undefined position and orientation of the goods in the carrier. A study regarding the qualitative and quantitative properties of goods that are transported in containers shows that there is a huge economic relevance for autonomous systems. In 2008, more than 8,4 billion Twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) were imported and unloaded manually at European ports, corresponding to more than 331,000 billion single goods items.

Besides the economic relevance, the opinion of market participants is an important factor for the success of new systems on the market. The main outcomes of a study regarding the challenges, opportunities and barriers in robotic-logistics, allow for the estimation of the economic efficiency of performance indicators, performance flexibility and soft factors. The economic efficiency of the performance parameters is applied to the parcel robot – a cognitive system to unload parcels autonomously from containers. In the following article, the results of the study are presented and the resultant conclusions discussed.