RBR50 Spotlight: Brightpick Autopicker applies mobile manipulation, AI for warehouse flexibility

Each picking and mobile manipulation have been challenging for robotics developers. In 2023, Brightpick unveiled Autopicker, which it claimed is the first commercially available autonomous mobile robot (AMR) that can pick and consolidate orders directly in warehouse aisles.

Autopicker combines a mobile platform, a robotic arm, machine vision, and artificial intelligence for e-commerce fulfillment. The innovative system's patented two-tote design enables it to retrieve orders from bins on shelving and pick items to one of its totes. This reduces the need for associates to spend time traveling with carts.

The robot can fulfill orders for everything from cosmetics and pharmaceuticals to e-grocery items, electronics, polybagged apparel, and spare parts. To do this, Autopicker uses proprietary 3D vision and algorithms trained on more than 500 million picks, as well as machine learning to improve over time.

Based in Cincinnati, Brightpick is a business unit of machine vision provider Photoneo. "On the AI side, this was not possible five to six years ago," Jan Zizka, co-founder and CEO of Brightpick, told The Robot Report. "The serious breakthroughs enable machine learning to generalize to unseen items."

Brightpick also offers a goods-to-person option for heavy or hard-to-pick items. Autopicker can raise its bins to waist height for ergonomic picking.

By working with standard shelves, the AMR can be deployed in less than a month, and warehouses can reconfigure storage as needed. The system also supports pallet picking, replenishment, dynamic slotting, buffering, and dispatch. It can store up to 50,000 SKUs.

Last year, Brightpick went from raising additional funding to deploying Autopicker at Netrush, Rohlik Group, and other customers. The system is available for direct purchase or through a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.