Halfway through, ProMat turned into a robot show. Of course it’s a given. These days, logistics and automation are closely related. In his decade since Amazon acquired Kiva, same-day and next-day shipping have become industry standards. Retailers unable to match the once-impossible speed are doomed to fall behind, and they need robots to do that.
Truck loading and unloading is one aspect of all these that is terribly under-tackled. Most of the solutions on display this week focus on transporting goods from point A to point B along the warehouse floor. Of course, it’s an important area, but anyone entering this category these days will find it useful enough to examine other elements of the universe.
After half a day at the show, the three companies popped out. The first is Agility, which offers the most human-like solution in the form of a bipedal Digit robot. The second is Boston Dynamics. The company has focused decades of impressive robotics research on the problem of creating stretches. The third is Pickle, a newcomer to the space.
The MIT-born startup unveiled its container unloading robot for the first time at ProMat this morning. From the beginning, Pickle has been single-mindedly focused on a specific problem, actually trying to tackle the more complex task of loading a container.
“We thought it was the hardest problem and it was still unsolved,” CEO Andrew Meyer told TechCrunch. “Before we spend millions of dollars building a business around this idea, we wanted to draw attention to how feasible this could be.”
Loading is still on Pickle’s roadmap, but for now we are fully focused on rolling out an unpacking solution. This is one of the most unpleasant roles for human workers on the warehouse floor, so it’s a big enough problem to occupy your company’s time. Not only is it physically taxing to lift and move heavy boxes at high speed, storage containers remain exposed to the elements while in the dock, causing the interior to become extremely hot or cold. often During the beta period, the Pickle system is running in a container with a temperature of 115 degrees (California). Subzero temperatures, on the other hand, remain a challenge.
The system is built around a modified Kuka arm with a customized off-the-shelf head equivalent to a large vacuum head with a foam tip that uses air suction to pick up objects up to 65 pounds. create something that The on-board vision system and AI decide which box to pick next (the box itself has no indicator) and mount it on the side or top depending on space constraints. Capable of picking up to 600 picks per hour, it drops a nearby conveyor onto his belt.
Pickle has raised $26 million in 2021. Meyer told TechCrunch that the startup is now looking to raise another $15 million to protect its runways in the wake of the SVB collapse.
“We weren’t with SVB, but we are all connected,” he told TechCrunch. “Our risk tolerance drops a little bit when we have this weird thing going on in our macros. The interesting thing is that now we’re releasing Pickle 1. Pickle 2 and 3 are coming back-to-back, Pickle 3 is the size of the market it’s designed to support and the profit margins of the hardware and services It will absolutely lift the whole business in terms of gross margins, and if we can get the Pickle 3 out there, we will be a cash-plus business.”
