Ambikit includes robots, vision and the AI to quickly learn how to pick and place items in kits. | Image credit: Ambi Robotics
Ambi Robotics introduces AmbiKit, a new multi-robot kitting solution that is designed to package “kits” . The automated solution uses artificial intelligence to learn how to identify and pick up items out of bulk storage and singulate them for the kitting operation. The company claims that their robots are trained 10,000x faster than alternatives.
The new kitting system includes a five-robot picking line, currently deployed to augment the pick and place tasks associated with one of today’s fastest growing ecommerce opportunities: online subscription boxes.
“Retailers and global ecommerce brands are operating in a year-round ‘peak’ season,” says Jim Liefer, CEO of Ambi Robotics. “In order for high-growth brands to fulfill online orders, companies are deploying AI-powered robotic systems to increase resilience in the supply chain. AmbiKit can immediately improve efficiency by deploying into existing workflows and successfully pick and place millions of unique items from day one.”
AmbiKit is designed to pick items from bulk for kitting operations. | Image credit: Ambi Robotics
AmbiKit is capable of picking and packing millions of unique products into specific bags or boxes for shipping to online customers. The cloud based nature of the system enables Ambi Robotics to learn new grasping methods and share those methods across the entire population of Ambi Robotics (no customer proprietary data is shared). The artificial intelligence in AmbiKit enable it to learn new products quickly.
As a result, AmbiKit is uniquely engineered for operation such as order personalization or the subscription box market. Ambi Robotics is working with some of their early subscription box customers to perfect the solution. AmbiKit is successfully sorting up to 60 items per minute in a commercial production environment. The kitting system alleviates existing manual warehouse processes for kitting operations that can cost retailers millions of dollars annually due to human error, high employee turnover and employee injury.
“Ambi Robotics has developed state-of-the-art simulation-to-reality AI that can adapt to perform in any hardware configuration,” says Jeff Mahler, Chief Technology Officer at Ambi Robotics. “Our advanced AI operating system powers a wide range of robotic solutions. When we launched Ambi Robotics, we made the decision to tackle the complex problems in the supply chain first, during a time when the U.S. relied on global ecommerce and logistics more than ever before.”
On-floor associates work alongside the AmbiKit system to induct totes with product and pack complete kits to be shipped to the end-customer. The AI-powered robotic system guides associates while sorting products to complete external actions through intuitive interfaces and dashboards.
Listen to our recent The Robot Report Podcast episode where we talk to Ambi Robotics founders: Ken Goldberg and Jim Liefer about pushing the limits of robot grasping.
