Today’s e-commerce distribution centres (DC) need to pick a large variety of items, which results in increasingly complex operations. Alongside this, the scarcity of manual labour further increases the pressure on DC performance. Smart Item Robotics (SIR) – also known as collaborative robotics or cobots – is an effective and risk-free way to gradually introduce robotic technology into a DC while retaining high levels of scalability and flexibility.
Vanderlande Robotics is overseeing a number of projects to develop workable robotic technology in anticipation of customer demand. It has a minority share in robotics development company Smart Robotics, which develops, sells and rents modular collaborative robots that can be configured for specific tasks such as order picking and placing, (de)palletising, and bagging where human operators are involved.