Welcome to the 39th newsletter for 2025!
Whether you're new here or a long-time subscriber, we’re excited to have you on this journey. At Whserobotics, our mission is simple yet powerful: to enable more robots in the warehouse. Whether you’re exploring automation or building a warehouse robot, we’re here to provide the resources and insights you need to make informed decisions. Start exploring today!
Editor’s Note: Why Robotics Deployments Really Stall
I’ve been on the road the last few months, walking sites where robotics deployments were underway. Some were thriving. Others had robots sitting idle in corners.
What struck me is this:
Robots rarely fail because the hardware broke.
They stall because the operation wasn’t designed to absorb them.
Here are the failure points I keep seeing:
Wi-Fi dead zones → invisible in testing, devastating in production
WMS integrations → fine at pilot scale, cracking under real order volumes
Exception handling → ignored until the first wave of ‘edge cases’ piled up
Ownership gaps → once vendors left, no one was quarterbacking the system
Field note:
At one ASRS deployment, the robots started dropping offline inside dense metal storage. Standard APs weren’t cutting it - the signal just died. Even the vendor had no explanation. The fix ended up being directional antennas, but we only found that through trial and error on the floor.
That’s the reality: from the outside, it looks like ‘the robots failed.’
But if you’ve lived it, you know it’s almost never the robot.
The real insight: robotics adoption isn’t a project.
It’s a system.
And like any system, it needs:
Infrastructure that bends without breaking
Integrations that hold under pressure
Operators who can recover when things go off script
A quarterback to keep the pieces moving together
That’s the lens I bring when I’m asked to de-risk robotics adoption.
Because the tech works.
The question is:- can your operation?
News
Thoughts? Questions? Feedback? Reply to this email.
If you've found value in this, why not pay it forward? Share this newsletter with someone who's just as passionate about warehouse robotics, and let's help the industry learn and grow together.
If someone forwarded you this email, then you can sign up here to continue receiving the latest in the warehouse robotics space.