Zebra's Industry Solutions can give your business a competitive advantage by connecting people, assets and data to help you make better decisions.
Scale and energize your retail strategy with a digital backbone that unifies your team, informs priorities and drives results with Zebra's retail technology solutions.
Zebra’s mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
Zebra's healthcare technology solutions provide patient identity management, mobile health devices, and business intelligence data to improve efficiency.
Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions enable manufacturers to become more agile, optimize plant floor performance and embrace market changes.
Zebra's market-leading solutions and products improve customer satisfaction with a lower cost per interaction by keeping service representatives connected with colleagues, customers, management and the tools they use to satisfy customers across the supply chain.
In today's world, the demands on transportation and logistics companies are higher than ever. Dedicated Warehouse, Fleet and Delivery, and Yard and Terminal solutions enable visibility to every aspect of your business and keep operations running flawlessly around the clock.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Learn how Zebra's public sector technology solutions empower state and local governments to improve efficiency with asset tracking and data capture devices.
Zebra's range of Banking technology solutions enables banks to minimize costs and to increase revenue throughout their branch network. Learn more.
Zebra's range of mobile computers equip your workforce with the devices they need from handhelds and tablets to wearables and vehicle-mounted computers.
Zebra's desktop, mobile, industrial, and portable printers for barcode labels, receipts, RFID tags and cards give you smarter ways to track and manage assets.
Zebra's 1D and 2D corded and cordless barcode scanners anticipate any scanning challenge in a variety of environments, whether retail, healthcare, T&L or manufacturing.
Zebra's extensive range of RAIN RFID readers, antennas, and printers give you consistent and accurate tracking.
Choose Zebra's reliable barcode, RFID and card supplies carefully selected to ensure high performance, print quality, durability and readability.
Zebra's location technologies provide real-time tracking for your organization to better manage and optimize your critical assets and create more efficient workflows.
Zebra's rugged tablets and 2-in-1 laptops are thin and lightweight, yet rugged to work wherever you do on familiar and easy-to-use Windows or Android OS.
With Zebra's family of fixed industrial scanners and machine vision technologies, you can tailor your solutions to your environment and applications.
Discover Zebra’s range of accessories from chargers, communication cables to cases to help you customize your mobile device for optimal efficiency.
Zebra's OEM scan engines, imagers, and private label OEM products offer flexible integration and help enhance product development with modern OEM technology.
Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labor costs low, your talent happy and your organization compliant. Create an agile operation that can navigate unexpected schedule changes and customer demand to drive sales, satisfy customers and improve your bottom line.
Empower the front line with prioritized task notification and enhanced communication capabilities for easier collaboration and more efficient task execution.
Get full visibility of your inventory and automatically pinpoint leaks across all channels.
Reduce uncertainty when you anticipate market volatility. Predict, plan and stay agile to align inventory with shifting demand.
Drive down costs while driving up employee, security, and network performance with software designed to enhance Zebra's wireless infrastructure and mobile solutions.
Explore Zebra’s printer software to integrate, manage and monitor printers easily, maximizing IT resources and minimizing down time.
Make the most of every stage of your scanning journey from deployment to optimization. Zebra's barcode scanner software lets you keep devices current and adapt them to your business needs for a stronger ROI across the full lifecycle.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
The Zebra Aurora suite of industrial automation software enables users of all experience levels to solve their track-and-trace and vision inspection needs.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
Zebra DNA is the industry’s broadest suite of enterprise software that delivers an ideal experience for all during the entire lifetime of every Zebra device.
Advance your digital transformation and execute your strategic plans with the help of the right location and tracking technology.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximize productivity without affecting your workflows, business processes and finances.
Zebra's Managed Service delivers worry-free device management to ensure ultimate uptime for your Zebra Mobile Computers and Printers via dedicated experts.
Find ways you can contact Zebra Technologies’ Support, including Email and Chat, ask a technical question or initiate a Repair Request.
Zebra's Circular Economy Program helps you manage today’s challenges and plan for tomorrow with smart solutions that are good for your budget and the environment.
The Zebra Knowledge Center provides learning expertise that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your environment.
Zebra has a wide variety of courses to train you and your staff, ranging from scheduled sessions to remote offerings as well as custom tailored to your specific needs.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Henry Ford is rumored to have once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” You’ve probably heard this before, as it’s been murmured by many an executive, entrepreneur, futurist and innovator. The quote is often used to highlight the nature of innovation and, more specifically, the barriers to adoption that challenge us to ask “why” innovation is necessary. Why create a car when all you need is a faster horse? As obvious as the answer seems now, it wasn’t back then. Ford made a name for himself answering that question. Though some may have initially undervalued his drive for innovation – deeming the automobile excessive or unnecessary – time tends to reveal the true purpose and significance of continuous innovation.
Zebra’ collaboration with FIRST® is a great modern-day example. Like Ford, we weren’t shooting for faster horses when we embarked on our journey with the organization in 1999. We wanted to foster innovation among youth and help them demonstrate why businesses should transition from “horses” to “cars” to achieve new efficiencies and improve future outcomes.
Yet, unlike Ford, we weren’t aiming to build a better or faster full-size automobile. Instead, we were (and still are) seeking to advance the development of smaller-scale robotics innovations that collaborate with humans to help students foster a burgeoning interest in STEM and improve gameplay in FIRST competitions.
By giving FIRST teams access to advanced intelligence technologies that could inform engineering decisions and performance refinement, we can help young creative minds turn their technology-based ideas into marketable innovations that could become as significant to society as Ford’s cars – even if they initially garner a few question marks as to their purpose or benefit. (You can read more about our mission with FIRST in my last blog post.)
However, innovation can stall if the means by which you’re innovating becomes stale itself.
FIRST participants have the potential to find solutions to industries’ greatest operational challenges. Their inventions can open up a world of possibilities, just like Ford’s car. But in order to enable such innovation as mentors and technology partners, we at Zebra must too transition from “horses” to “cars.”
Let me explain…
We’ve always been confident that the same hardware and sensors used in Zebra MotionWorks™ real-time location solution (RTLS) could optimize FIRST gameplay. The data collected has a depth to it that can be used to help break down complex games and strategies into easier-to-absorb concepts for those who are new to FIRST, particularly those watching competition in person and via live streams. It can also provide individual teams with in-depth opportunities for descriptive, prescriptive and predictive analytics which they can apply to better their own robots. Additionally, the utilization of location data allows teams to assess future alliance partners and opponents and develop or refine their own game strategies.
We just needed to prove its value to the FIRST community across the U.S. and around the world, which we have successfully done, I’m proud to announce today. (More on that in a minute.) However, creating a portable system that easily allows for widespread RTLS utilization in FIRST has been akin to the challenges that Ford faced early on. We haven’t gotten to where we are now without overcoming a few obstacles. That’s because optimizing any technology’s conceptual application in a real-world setting – and proving that it’s worthy of full-scale adoption – takes time, patience and “failure.”
When we first debuted the application of our location solutions for FIRST at the Half Hollow Hills Invitational competition, an off-season FIRST Robotics Competition event in October 2017, all hands were on deck. There were nearly 10 Zebra employees present to set up and run the solution. However, we had to manually start and stop the collection of match data and then upload it all to a web hosting location to make it publicly available for teams’ utilization – which wasn’t happening in real time. (Not ideal.) And, while Zebra is a global company and we are passionate about providing our expertise wherever and whenever possible, our attendance at every FIRST event to manage this system is not realistic. Besides that, we never wanted our RTLS solution for high school robotics competitions to be so complicated that having an expert on hand was necessary to utilize it.
So, we got to work. We created and refined a RTLS data acquisition and processing application built specifically for FIRST and integrated with the organization’s official Field Management System (the electronics core of a FIRST Robotics competition that encompasses both hardware and software). This allows for the automated collection and uploading of match data to the cloud for global accessibility by participants.
We also worked with the RoboSports Network (RSN) to share the resulting data on its live feed to supplement commentary. (RSN live-streams coverage of many FIRST Robotics competitions.)
We then brought the system to the Chezy Champs Robotics Competition and the Indiana Robotics Invitational, two premier off-season events, to trial setup and maintenance with fewer and fewer Zebra employees at each event.
In October of 2019, Zebra shipped a complete RTLS system to Michigan for the Bloomfield Girls Robotics Competition, another off-season event. FIRST students and mentors picked it up, set it up, ran it and returned it – no Zebra employees involved!
This seamless out-of-box experience marked an important milestone for the future of this Zebra MotionWorks-based solution at FIRST competitions. Previously, at least one Zebra employee had to be present for setup and operation. In Michigan, just two weeks later, the solution was handled by FIRST students and mentors from arrival to departure. Eliminating the need for a Zebra location solutions expert onsite to manage setup and troubleshooting has removed a significant barrier to widespread adoption.
The off-season has been our sweet spot for RTLS thus far, but it hasn’t been our only spot. We supplied the MotionWorks system at both of the SBPLI Long Island Regional Competitions in 2019 and intend to do so again in 2020.
We are also pleased to announce that we will be providing even more systems across the United States every year, beginning with the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition season. This will allow Zebra to provide competition data on robot movements to over 750 teams in 2020, allowing them to more strategically choose alliances and identify problem areas using heatmap-derived insights – and that’s just to start. There are a number of ways that teams can apply RTLS analytics during robotics engineering and training, and we expect gameplay to be optimized on an entirely new level. Stay tuned for updates on RTLS utilization and outcomes in future Your Edge blog posts.
(Editor’s Note: You can subscribe to weekly blog updates here to stay in the know.)
You may be asking why Zebra has felt compelled to expand its relationship with FIRST over the years and why we put so much effort into refining an RTLS solution for high school robotics competitions. The answer is simple:
Just as FIRST prides itself in being about “More Than Robots,” Zebra’s technological significance expands far beyond printers and barcode scanners.
We are shaping the “systems of reality” – the enterprise intelligence platforms – that will serve as the foundation of future technology innovation. Our pioneering efforts span from artificial intelligence to intelligent automation, with both our hardware and software solutions delivering significant outcomes for customers and consumers (including yourself) every day. As such, we’re in a rare and privileged position to influence the next generation of innovators.
For example, we’re ecstatic that we can enable students to leverage the exact same track-and-trace technology being used with MRI machines, in automotive manufacturing factories and in every NFL stadium today to strengthen the skill sets and deliver the intelligence they’ll need to innovate for the future. The confluence of our technology, our commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility and the brilliance of FIRST students will help us do even more for the next generation of builders, doers and problem solvers.
Find more technical discussions on our Developer Portal blog.
Visit the Zebra Story Hub for more interviews, news, and industry trend analysis.
Legal Terms of Use Privacy Policy Supply Chain Transparency
ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2023 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.