Although we often think about the designers and entrepreneurs who bring us the latest cutting-edge devices, it's easy to forget about the logistics chain which allows your California- or South Korean-designed smartphone to wind up in your local store. But that's exactly the point.
Like the editing in a movie, when the logistics chain works perfectly, the greatest compliment is, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, that it "just works". But as with every other industry, this chain is in the process of being disrupted by changing demands. In 2016, consumers demand not only more choices, but also to receive products faster than before. And there are ever more of them demanding it - according to analysts at Forrester Research, the growth of online shopping is currently rising at ten per cent year-on-year, and faster than that in Asia.
"Most companies are eager to improve and to squeeze all they can from optimised efficiency," says Arne Viehmeister-Kerner of MULTIROTOR, a leading German company in the B2B drone industry. "Right now, we're at a point where conventional technology is already at such a high standard there's not much more room for improvement. As a result, companies are looking for new technologies they can use."
Read more: Mercedes vans filled with swarming delivery bots could be heading to your hometown
One of the biggest and most high profile step-changes in logistics over the coming years will be the arrival of autonomous delivery vehicles. Self-driving trucks - the big brothers of Google's self-driving car - offer a tantalising glimpse at the next generation of haulage vehicles. In April this year, a trial took place in which a platoon of connected "smart" trucks drove themselves from Sweden and Germany to the port of Rotterdam, as an investigation into the potential of driverless vehicles.
Even more significant than driverless trucks will be pilotless ships, says Ørnulf Jan Rødseth, a research scientist who has spent the past several decades investigating exactly this topic for Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks (MUNIN), a European Commission research project.
"The eventual goal is to completely remove the human crew from ships," Rødseth says. "It's an idea that opens up entirely new possibilities in terms of new business models." Rødseth notes that ship transport is responsible for an overwhelmingly large proportion of the goods that are shuttled around the globe. "Ninety per cent of imports and exports in the world take place by ship," he says. "You cannot underestimate how important it is."
By removing humans from the role of ship operators, it will be possible to develop new concepts - minus crew accommodation and safety equipment - that will transform merchant shipping with entirely redesigned, more efficient vessels.
Of course, when it comes to the promise of revolutionised transportation, the most widespread dream is that of drone-based delivery. Widely publicised after a December 2013 television interview with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, drone delivery ("Amazon Prime Air") will rely on multirotor miniature unmanned air vehicles to autonomously fly individual packages to the doorsteps of customers within half an hour of them placing an order. Since then, other companies have investigated similar concepts. For example, in September 2014, the German delivery firm DHL tested a "parcelcopter" which autonomously delivered urgent packages such as medication to the 2,000-person island of Juist, 12km off the German coast.
For now, drone delivery remains a "proof of concept" due to a combination of technical challenges, such as battery life, and regulatory issues, including the insistence that drone operators can only fly drones within their line of sight. But although some of these technologies still have hurdles to overcome, drones are already playing an important role in other parts of the logistics chain - such as being item "scouts" which find or catalogue specific items in large warehouses.
Already having significant impact are the industrial robots used in factories. Factory robots date back to 1956, but the kinds of machines being manufactured by companies such as Boston-based Rethink Robotics are as different as the modern iMac is from a 1950s mainframe. Traditionally, buying an industrial robot didn't just mean shelling out for the machine itself; it also meant adapting warehouses and tasks to fit the new robot.
Now some of these barriers are starting to come down. In most of western Europe, the cost threshold for robotic workers to become viable is currently around €100,000, yielding a positive return on investment in around three years, based on productivity gains of 20-30 per cent. Robots are also becoming more and more affordable, whereas human labour costs continue to rise. But the biggest change will be qualitative.
"The more traditional robot forms are custom-designed to do one task. They do it really well, but if they're not doing it, then they sit there and idle," says Jim Lawton, chief product officer at Rethink Robotics. "The newer types of robot, because of the smarts that are built into them, are like PCs with arms. If I buy a computer, I don't necessarily know up front what I'm going to with it. Today I may be writing a paper, tomorrow I might be filling out a spreadsheet. The computer accommodates whatever it is that I need to do."
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that instead of simply programming robots to do one task for their whole working life, they can (and will increasingly) be capable of carrying out a broad range of tasks - with instruction being as straightforward as showing them a video.
Beyond speed, what will be the impact of this increasingly unmanned logistics chain? The answer lies in the amount of personalisation that they make possible. Henry Ford is erroneously supposed to have told Model T customers that they could have their car in any colour they wanted, so long as it happened to be black. Now, successful companies will be those that can most keenly sense marketplace demand and respond to it quickly, efficiently and at a reasonable cost - whether that's car manufacturers allowing customers to choose custom modifications, sportswear brands letting shoppers design their own trainers, or simply the ability to package up different product combinations according to local demand.
"For a long time you could get what you wanted when you wanted it, but that came with more costly systems which customers weren't willing to pay for, or else they were mass-produced in a way that limits choice," Lawton says. "Consumers today want more, and they also want to be able to change their mind."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
