To serve these clients, Randa operates a far-reaching DC network that includes facilities in Toronto, Canada; Melbourne, Australia; Glenrothes, Scotland; Johannesburg, South Africa. It also operates three locations in the United States, located in New Orleans; Reno, Nevada; And Fort Worth, Texas.
In those facilities, workers perform typical warehousing tasks: processing forms; Product inspection; Packing stock, weight and shipping. A few unlucky people are assigned one of the most undesirable work tasks in the warehouse: unloading incoming containers. What makes this task so unpopular is its “discomfort factor”: the work is arduous and repetitive, and must be carried out in places that get extremely hot in the summer and cold in the winter. So, in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of employees, Randa looked for a solution to automate the task.
Reducing the load
After a long search, Randa found what she was looking for in an autonomous vacuum robot from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based robotics company Pickle Robot. Designed to unload trucks, trailers and import containers at human level or better performance, the Pickle Robot consists of a bright green robotic arm mounted on a rolling base. The unit is also intelligent, leveraging computer vision, machine learning, generative AI (artificial intelligence), and sensors to guide its actions. Thanks to an advanced “autonomous stacker,” it is able to move around inside the container or trailer, pick up boxes of different shapes and sizes using the suction-based gripper, and deposit the boxes on a flexible conveyor that transports them to DC for the next step in the receiving process.
In mid-October, Randa deployed the Pickle Robot to its logistics fulfillment center in Fort Worth, where it immediately went to work unloading containers. Today, the robot does the heavy lifting — which in this case means unloading cardboard boxes weighing up to 30 pounds from containers each holding between 800 and 1,200 boxes — while employees manage the robot and final operations inside the building. As of early January, the Pickle Robot has unloaded more than 1.5 million pounds of clothing, according to the two companies.
As for how the robot will be received by its human co-workers, the news is good in that regard. According to Randa, the company’s internal team and implementation partners had a positive reaction to working alongside Pickle Robot and now consider the robot a member of the team.
“We are always looking for innovative technology that improves the business experience for our partners and the efficiency of our operations,” Randy Kennedy, chief logistics officer at Randa Apparel & Accessories, said in a statement. “We’ve been looking for a practical solution for unloading containers for over five years because this is an important part of our operations. The Pickle Robot checks all the right boxes for Randa.”
