Butler, a stubby, orange robot, crawls along the aisles to fetch everything from smartphones to shampoos from warehouse shelves. It takes an hour to do what an average worker does in five. Its cousin Sorter, a smart conveyor belt, arranges parcels by weight, size and delivery location at least four times quicker than humans.
Built by India’s largest warehouse robotics startup GreyOrange, they help online retailers and logistics firms cut delivery time and costs, central to the fight for supremacy in this nation’s booming e-commerce market. The startup operates from Gurugram and Singapore counts the country’s biggest e-tailer Flipkart, furniture portal Pepperfry and courier service providers DTDC and Delhivery among its clients.
“With the help of these robots, an order can be picked from the warehouse and dispatched in 20 minutes,” said Akash Gupta, co-founder and chief technology officer of GreyOrange. The robots are already sorting about 1.2 crore packets a month, he said. Butler and Sorter could even replace 60-80 percent of warehouse workforce, according to a GreyOrange presentation. Full Story