Brightpick announces mobile picking robot Autopicker

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Brightpick, the business unit of Photoneo and provider of warehouse automation systems, announced Autopicker, an autonomous mobile picking robot for e-commerce and grocery order fulfillment. 

Autopickers move around warehouses, retrieving product store totes from shelving and robotically picking items from those totes to consolidate orders directly in aisles. Many autonomous storage systems involve robots that bring totes to human pickers, who then take out the items needed for an order, but Autopicker is able to pick these items directly. 

If an item is too complex for the robot to pick, it will bring it to the nearest human to allow them to complete the pick instead. 

The system takes less than a month to deploy, and allows warehouses to reduce their picking labor by up to 95%. A typical system can consist of anywhere from 15 to 100 robots, whose fleet and fulfillment processes are orchestrated and optimized by Brightpick Intuition software. 

Deployment is so quick because Autopicker works with standard warehouse shelving and totes, unlike other systems that require specific infrastructure for the robots to work in. The Brightpick system can help companies increase storage density in warehouses by 250% while still using standard 10 ft high shelving. With multiple levels, storage density can be even higher. 

Autopicker can reliably pick groceries, cosmetics, personal care products, electronics, pharmaceuticals, apparel and more with 99.9% accuracy, according to Brightpick. Its AI algorithms have been trained on more than 250 million picks to date, and are improving with each pick using machine learning. 

The system is available under two different purchasing methods, the first is a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, which allows customers to automate with lower overhead costs, and the second is a capex model, which allows customers to purchase the robots outright. 

Just last month, Brightpick announced that it brought in $19 million in funding, bringing Photoneo’s Series B round to a total of $40 million. The company plans to use the latest round of funding to further expand into the US. This round brings Photoneo’s total funding to date to $53 million.