With over 180 billion cases picked in 2022, case picking consumes a significant amount of space, labor, and specialized equipment.

This process requires endless amounts of walking, heavy lifting, and possibly a significant amount of pulling for a pallet to be picked and built by a human to be run effectively and therefore issues like chronic labor shortages, high turnover, and insufficient inventory space cause significant issues.

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) can be used instead of pallet jacks, walkie riders, or equivalent pallet transportation equipment to eliminate the need for a human to walk long distances or pull equipment containing a pallet as that human can now stay in one area and wait for an AMR to bring a pallet to that area, but this does not eliminate the heavy lifting required by a human to build a pallet.

Apollo, our general-purpose humanoid robot, can work in conjunction with autonomous tuggers to fully automate the kit or tote-based lineside or workcell delivery process and eliminate the need for humans to manually transfer totes to lines or workcells from tugger carts.

This enables line or workcell operators to work without interruption or the upskilling of lower skilled labor assigned to service multiple line or workcell positions. As Apollo is a general purpose robot, it can handle different tasks is a manufacturing plant and task switch throughout the day.

While there are a million forms of special purpose automation that do one or two tasks, Apollo will be able to do millions of tasks, especially those that humans don’t want to do.