This paper provides a description and analysis of research in material handling systems in regard to energy-harvesting, ultra-low-power devices. Particular attention is paid to the inBin smart device, energy-harvesting, and the perfor-mance availability of material handling systems. A detailed description of the hardware platform, architecture and testbed is provided and an approach to model systems with a large number of devices is presented. Within the proposed model, two scenarios are simulated and their implications for the architecture of future materials handling systems are discussed.