In intralogistics, there has been a real hype about robotics for some years now, whether in trade journals or at fairs. Most of them are classic six-axis articulated robots that are looking for their way out of a production environment and into logistics. The goal: fully automated small-parts picking.

The main driver here is the labor shortage, and the big challenge isn’t a technical component like the robot or the gripper, but the design of an overall economic process. Because robots can handle only a portion of the items in each assortment, there are parallel streams of goods and thus possible risks with regard to the flow of goods, inventories, synchronization, and consolidation.

The “autopick” picking robot from psb intralogistics GmbH in Pirmasens, Germany, meets this challenge. At its core, the fully automated solution for picking individual items consists of a robot with gripper, the IT network for the entire system, and a powerful image-processing system that’s equipped with two Ensenso 3D cameras from IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH.

 …