AMR charging dock at 95% utilization. The charging queue is the real bottleneck.
If you have ever hit the patient pattern - robots queuing up at charging stations during peak hours, you already know the throughput hit. Operators see it as a fleet sizing issue. The automation team sees it as a charging strategy issue. Both are right; only one fixes it.
Devs and lead partnered with Multipoint to add wireless charging to two robots. We expected a 15-20 minute pickup zone bump. We got a 3 to 4 minute lift, with consistent 22-minute cycle time. That is a small case but a useful one. Wireless reduces the queue time. It does not increase the active time, but it reduces the idle time, which is what most fleet models assume away.
Here is what caught my attention. The energy-infrastructure related buy-in is becoming a deeper constraint as well as racking layouts at floor zones. We are seeing sites where the automation hardware works perfectly, but they cannot scale up to support the next phase. Their charging architecture was designed to support 10% mobility uptime.
The next botleneck in mobile-system warehouses is not the software or the hardware. It is electrical. A subscription does not absorb a cracked floor or a misaligned floor. An orchestration platform does not regenerate a conveyor section installed three out of three.
Operations directors running closed-loop container flows: what shrinkage rate does your team start investigating, and is it more than your dock door cycle time predictor? In our experience, dock door cycle time is the more reliable predictor.