Brightpick, a provider of warehouse automation systems for order fulfillment, announced the first installation of its Autopicker in the pharmaceutical industry. The company has recently ramped up its operations to fill the recent demand, and it is now manufacturing hundreds of robots annually for installations across the world.
Brightpick’s Autopicker is an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) that moves around the warehouse, retrieves product storage totes from shelving, and robotically picks items from those totes to consolidate orders directly in the aisle.
The first pharmaceutical deployment of Autopicker is at a European pharmaceutical distribution center, which will be using Autopicker robots to pick orders to regularly replenish a chain of pharmacies. According to Brightpick, the company is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Europe, with thousands of pharmacies across multiple countries.
The deployment is scheduled to go live in the distribution center in October. If needed, Brightpick’s robots can easily determine and pick pharmaceutical items that expire the soonest or quickly stop picking from any batch, which could be needed if, for example, a batch is found to be defective.
“Demand for Brightpick Autopicker has far exceeded our expectations,” Jan Zizka, CEO and co-founder of Brightpick, said. “E-commerce and e-grocery companies seem to quickly understand the operational enhancements that a fleet of Brightpick Autopicker robots can provide. Our strongest traction is in grocery and pharmaceuticals probably because our robots excel at picking those items and can pick from ambient and chilled zones.”
Autopicker’s unique in-aisle robotic picking capabilities mean the robot doesn’t have to spend time traveling back and forth to a centralized picking station. Autopicker can be used for a range of picking activities, including goods-to-person picking, stock replenishment, pallet picking, and dynamic slotting.
Along with pharmaceuticals, Autopickers can also handle ambient and chilled groceries, packaged goods, cosmetics, electronics, medical devices, polybagged apparel, and more.
Brightpick has also recently completed a nine-month pilot of its robotic system in Rohlik Group’s Prague fulfillment center. Rohlik Group is one of the largest e-grocers in Europe and has more than 1.5 million e-grocery customers and handles 12 million orders per year.
Since the pilot, Rohlik has deployed the Brightpick system in its Munich fulfillment center and has plans to continue rolling out Brightpick robots in Frankfurt, Virginia, Prague, and other fulfillment centers during the remainder of 2023 and 2024.
Rohlik is using the Autopickers and Brightpick’s Dispatcher robots to fully automate the picking, consolidation and dispatch of orders. Several other pilots are planned in the US and Europe with major grocery companies, third-party logistics companies, and medical distributors.
