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Online shopping to fill the void? You’re not alone: The average consumer spent $254 on impulse buys in the past month.
And since there are only a handful of companies responsible for getting yet another pair of sweatpants from your phone screen to your door, the pressure is on ahead of what’s projected to be one of the largest-ever holiday shopping seasons.
On Thursday, FedEx detailed its tech game plan for getting through it.
Robotic arms: FedEx’s Memphis facility installed four robotic arms in March, which move packages from collection bins to conveyor belts.
- Randall, Colin, Sue, and Bobby can each sort ~1,300 packages per hour.
Delivery robots: Roxo, the autonomous bot FedEx began testing last year, can make local same-day deliveries. What’s new this year? FedEx Autonomous Mobility Ecosystem (FAME): A management platform—for use with Roxo and future autonomous tools—that can dispatch a bot for a particular task or control a fleet.
Autonomous vehicles: FedEx Ground is testing out autonomous vehicles to help move trailers from loading docks. FedEx told us it’s also invested in ~5x more of Vecna Robotics’s autonomous “tuggers,” which use sensors to navigate and move bulky packages between loading spots.
Looking ahead: If you thought we were already in an industrial robotics boom...just wait.