Six conveyor and sortation trends maintenance crews will meet

Modern Materials Handling’s briefing on conveyor and sortation trends, written with Trew, lists the work of getting fixed equipment and mobile robots to share a building. Hytrol chief revenue officer Mitch Smith is quoted on marrying conveyor, AMRs, goods-to-person, and automated storage so they run as one system. Interroll’s Martin Clark is quoted on the spread of AMRs and articulating-arm robots.

The same piece says AI is showing up in equipment design, including shop drawings and bills of material that shorten lead time, and in sortation, where it can help a user maintain equipment and cut downtime. Modular conveyor, shorter deployment, and noise reduction are the other trends named for teams planning 2025 projects.

For a crew, the useful line is the maintenance one. A sorter that warns before it stops is a different job from the technician already standing at a stopped zone. Both belong in the building. They are not the same call.