Keep more orders moving from pick to pack
Ocado’s Robotic Sort Putwall uses intelligent vision and robotic handling to place suitable items into the right order compartments, increasing throughput while reducing repetitive manual work
Picking more items only improves fulfilment when those items can be separated into the right customer orders quickly enough. As volume grows, repeatedly identifying and placing individual items into the correct compartments can become the next operational constraint.
Robotic Sort Putwall automates this repeated placement task. It identifies each item, manipulates it to locate the barcode and places it into the compartment assigned to the order. Associates focus on releasing orders to the next stage and resolving exceptions, helping the operation turn picking capacity into faster order flow.
Follow every item from identification to the right order
Use intelligence to handle real product variation
Sortation is not a perfectly uniform task. Items arrive in different shapes, orientations and packaging, and deformable merchandise can be difficult to handle consistently.
Robotic Sort Putwall combines computer vision, grasping and manipulation technology with a gripper that uses suction and actuating fingers. The gripper can be configured around the item profile, allowing the robot to handle suitable merchandise securely and delicately, including polybagged apparel and accessories.
AI powered reinforcement learning allows handling knowledge and adaptations to be shared between robots. This helps performance improve as the system learns from the items it handles, while remote human support can resolve rare exceptions and return work to the normal flow.
Add sortation capacity as demand grows
Robotic Sort Putwall is a standalone solution. This allows businesses
to introduce robotic sortation into a suitable existing workflow without adopting a wider storage system.
Additional robots can be introduced as throughput requirements grow. Ocado assesses the incoming item volume, number of open orders, product characteristics and downstream process to determine the right configuration. This helps ensure that added sortation capacity resolves the operational constraint rather than moving the queue to packing or dispatch.
Design the solution around your merchandise and operations
Supports polybagged apparel and accessories weighing up to approximately 2.27 kg (5 lb), with 26 order compartments. The standard gripper can be optimised for the merchandise it needs to handle.
Product suitability, presentation, labelling, arrival rate and exception handling all influence performance. Ocado assesses these factors alongside site requirements, integration responsibilities and the surrounding workflow before confirming the solution design.
Where does sortation limit your operation?
Tell us about your merchandise, order profile and current sortation process. We will assess where Robotic Sort Putwall could reduce repetitive manual work, increase throughput and help more orders move efficiently from picking to packing.