E-Commerce major, Flipkart has deployed 100 robots for packaging operations at its delivery centre in the city of Bengaluru. The robots referred to as automated guided vehicles (AGVs), pick up products from a
conveyor belt and drop them to packages dedicated to specific pin codes. The robots leverage collision avoidance technology for seamless operations.
“The big problem that we want to solve with automation in e-commerce is supply chain. We want to solve for precision, we want to solve for scale and we want to solve for efficiency. All of these aspects are very important for us if we want to reach the next 200 million customers,” said Krishna Raghavan, SVP of technology at eKart.
With this, the facility can conclude 4,500 packages in an hour which is roughly ten times more than manual operations.
“In terms of up-skilling, while you have a person just placing a product on the bot as one activity, there’s more that happens behind the scenes when it comes to operating that machinery. The other thing is when we expand this offering to other facilities, these folks will actually become trainers,” added Raghavan.
“You can increase the number of bots and get more scale from the same floor area using the same resources,” said Pranav Saxena, VP, Robotics and Automation, eKart.