New Robot Picks Individual Items from Warehouse Shelves
June 15th, 2016Via: MIT Technology Review:
A German firm called Magazino believes it has built a better warehouse robot: the Toru. Unlike the robots used in Amazon warehouses that help locate items for shipping by moving entire shelves, Toru robots can pick up individual items.
“The [Amazon] approach saves a lot of human work spent on walking around, but there is still the need for a human worker to eventually pick the item off the shelf,” explains Magazino CEO and cofounder Frederik Brantner (see “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse, Human-Robot Symbiosis”).
Toru robots are particularly advantageous for orders that involve several items, Brantner says. For a four-item order, for instance, the Amazon robot might have to bring four shelves to the shipping station and then take those shelves back, for a total of eight trips. Toru can go to each of the four shelves one after the other and deliver them all to the shipping station in one trip. And there are no shelves to return.
