Automation is coming to warehouses — fast. While some companies like Amazon are developing their own robotic fleets in-house, others have turned to outside players for their automation tech.
FedEx has dabbled with both strategies. And the $84 billion company has landed on partnerships with robotics companies as the best approach to keep up with its peers in the race toward automation.
FedEx’s recent multi-year partnership with SoftBank-owned robotics company Berkshire Grey illustrates its strategy: turn to the experts to develop robots that can take on repetitive, dangerous jobs for humans. Under the non-exclusive partnership, the companies developed Scoop, a bot designed for bulk package unloading, or removing large bundles of multiple parcels from a truck at once.
FedEx will start rolling out these robots to its warehouses through a pilot program later this year. While these robots won’t work with every single one of FedEx’s thousands of unloading doors, the company hopes to be able to scale the bot if all goes well.
Stephanie Cook, director of advanced technology and innovation, robotics, at FedEx, told TechCrunch that bulk unloading is one of the most physically demanding and unpredictable jobs in the FedEx warehouse. This isn’t the company’s first attempt to automate bulk unloading, Cook said, adding they had trouble finding the right robot for the job.
“There’s nothing that is off-the-shelf that we recognize will work for our needs,” Cook said. “We worked with Berkshire Grey in the past and felt this was a good fit for us in terms of a collaboration. We knew it wasn’t something that we could just develop in a matter of months. It was going to take a multi-year journey to get here.”
Bulk unloading is also a perfect role for a robot, O.P. Skaaksrud, vice president of advanced technology and innovation, at FedEx, told TechCrunch. While bulk unloading does require these bots to make decisions, they aren’t as granular as if t …