Locus Robotics surpasses 1 billion units picks

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| Source: Locus Robotics

Locus Robotics said its autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have now surpassed one billion picks. The company’s billionth pick was made at a home improvement retailer warehouse in Florida, where a LocusBot picked a cordless rotary tool kit. Just milliseconds after the billionth pick, another LocusBot picked a scented candle from a home goods warehouse in Ohio, and a running jacket from a global fitness and shoe brand in Pennsylvania. 

The company completed its billionth pick just 59 days after hitting its 900 millionth unit picked. For comparison, it took Locus 1,542 days to pick its first 100 million units. Since the company’s founding, LocusBots have traveled over 17 million miles in customers’ warehouses. 

“There’s been a perception in the market that robots are kind of nascent, that robots are the cool new thing, but they’re not tested,” Kait Peterson, senior director of product marketing at Locus, said. “And I think what this billion pick milestone shows to the industry is that we are proven. It is a proven technology.”

LocusBots have been deployed in more than 200 sites around the world, with some sites using as many as 500 LocusBots. These deployments make it so that LocusBots are picking items every few milliseconds, depending on the operations they’re in. 

The company offers its LocusBots through a Robotics as a Service (RaaS) model. This model not only allows the company to deploy more quickly, but it also gives the company the ability to step in if a robot isn’t operating properly. 

“The RaaS model allows us to send more bots if a customer needs it,” Peterson said. “So, for example, in peak timeframe, when a customer’s volume goes up significantly, we can send additional bots to the customer site to allow them to handle that additional capacity in their warehouse, and then they can send them back once they’re done using them, or they can keep them, either way.” 

Locus’ range of AMRs is made up of the Origin, the company’s flagship AMR that can operate for 14 hours on a single charge and has a payload capacity of 80 lbs, Vector, an AMR with a 600 lb payload capacity, and Max, the company’s heaviest capacity AMR with a 3,000 lb payload limit. 

Last year, Locus acquired Waypoint Robotics, another AMR company whose portfolio of heavier capacity AMRs complemented Locus’. The Vector and the Max were originally Waypoint robots before the acquisition. 

While the company’s most recent 100 million picks took it less than 60 days, Peterson expects its next 100 million picks will be achieved even faster. Already, the company is 3% closer to achieving another billion picks.