BENGALURU: Flipkart has deployed as many as 100 robots to help sort packages at one of its delivery hubs in the outskirts of Bengaluru, the first such instance of the ecommerce giant deploying robotics to streamline its supply chain.

The robots, dubbed automated guided vehicles (AGVs), pick products from a conveyor belt, scan them and then drop them down a chute that’s assigned to a particular pin code. The robots work in a tight grid, using collision avoidance technology to ensure free movement. “The big problem that we want to solve with automation in ecommerce is supply chain,” said Krishna Raghavan, SVP, tech, eKart. “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.”

The installation is able to sort 4,500 packages in an hour, 10 times more than a human would be able to do manually. Moreover, the throughput of the system can be increased by five times with minimal increases in infrastructure and addition of robots.

Pranav Saxena, VP of robotics and automation at eKart, said the system, which was co-developed along with vendors, is ideal for ecommerce in India, which sees a lot of peaks in orders during sale periods. “You can increase the number of bots and get more scale from the same floor area using the same resources,” Saxena added.

Published On : 20-03-2019

Source : Economic Times