When building a business case for robotic piece-picking, the first thing to consider is how much inventory is addressable by robots. Thanks to its best-in-class gripper and fleetwide machine learning, the RightPick system can pick the widest range of SKUs with minimal to no custom engineering, reducing cost, increasing scalability, and taking into account constant changes in warehouse inventory.
A RightPick piece-picking robot first singulates an item with its suction cup, then stabilizes the item with integrated gripping through transit and placement. This singulation ensures that the robot only picks up what it wants to, but by nature requires an available surface on the item to allow a suction seal. To determine if your inventory is a good match for robotic piece-picking, consider the following characteristics:
No smaller than a lip balm tube or a matchbook.
No bigger than a shoebox or a jug of detergent.
For a good suction seal like with a box or bottle.
Boxes should be secured shut with glue or tape.
Up to 3kg depending on the item.
Such as folded apparel in poly or mylar bags.
If it requires two hands, a robot can't pick it.
Suction is bad on perforated or fabric surfaces.
Fruits and vegetables are best picked by humans.
Such as food container lids that snap together.
Lids or bags that can open easily.
We don't give robots knives.
If you feel your target inventory generally falls within scope of the good examples for items to send to a robot, the next step is to consider your robot-pickable inventory on a throughput basis rather than a SKU count basis.
Contact us for more infoA large portion of warehouse sales volume is commonly attributed to a proportionally small number of SKUs. A quick analysis by our Solution Design team can show how much of your throughput is addressable based on SKU-specific size, weight, and packaging flags.
How and where to leverage robotic piece-picking depends on how the portion of addressable SKUs maps into an average order profile. Workflows dominated by single line orders are simple enough to address with robots, while a solution for partially robot-pickable multi-line orders will depend on frequency of occurrence and a warehouse’s capacity for order consolidation. Our solution designers will walk you through order analysis and workflow considerations to optimize robot utilization and simplify the surrounding flow of items.
Let our experts take the unknown out of integrating the RightPick system into your warehouse. From item qualification and order analysis, through to workcell design and API communication, our team checks all the boxes to optimize robot utilization, minimize intervention, and deliver day one value to customers and warehouse operators alike.
