Piece picking robots make their mark

I’ve never seen so much interest, if not desperation, to improve fulfillment,” says James Lawton, vice president and general manager of robotics automation at Zebra Technologies. And that’s true for companies as diverse as FedEx and iHerb. Both companies, and many others in between, have recently turned to piece picking robotic systems to solve their fulfillment challenges. But we are to a great extent still in the early stages of robotic piece picking. After all, it was only January 2015 that Modern Materials Handling reported on what was probably one of the first robotic piece-picking pilots “The robots are coming – Part I.” So, a little guidance on best practices in the selection and use of a piece-picking robotics fulfillment system may be appreciated. Piece picking robots are no cookie-cutter answer, even if they may look like one to the untrained eye. As Simon Kalouche, founder of Nimble puts it, “No one wants to automate and lose throughput in the process.”