7 Warehouse Robots for Retail Automation
Summary
The startup claims that Chuck, which looks a bit like a treadmill with the readout awkwardly stuck in the middle, is technologically similar to autonomous vehicles, with sensors like LiDARs and machine learning algorithms for cloud-based navigation and control. A three-year-old company called CommonSense Robotics out of Tel Aviv, Israel, raised $20 million earlier this year in a bid to take a piece of the on-demand grocery market. CommonSense appears to be engaged in a version of urban guerrilla warfare, with plans to operate out of existing retail spaces no bigger than 10,000 square feet in the middle of cities, rather than in cavernous warehouses on the outskirts. For instance, all the news stories are pretty much the same: Darkstore works by enabling e-commerce retail brands to store their inventory in major cities and provides on-demand and same-day home delivery at lower prices. Its “mobile manipulation robot,” Swift, can travel autonomously through the warehouse, finding and identifying products, and then picking them up with one of a variety of grasping ends that can lift up to 15 pounds.
