Peter Santos, Chief Operating Officer of Pickle Robot Company, presents the “Real-World Deployment of Mobile Material Handling Robotics in the Supply Chain” tutorial at the May 2025 Embedded Vision Summit.
More and more of the supply chain needs to be, and can be, automated. Demographics, particularly in the developed world, are driving labor scarcity. Additionally, in manual material handling turnover, injury rates and absenteeism are rampant. Fortunately, modern warehouse robotic systems are becoming able to see and manipulate cartons and bags at levels of speed and dependability that can deliver strongly positive ROI to supply chain operators.
However, moving such systems into production in the complexity of real-world warehouses requires exceptional levels of product capability and rigor around testing and deployment practices. Many equipment vendors reach the pilot stage, then fail to break through to production due to the absence of this rigor. This talk focuses on three core principles of successful production deployments: complexity acceptance, test set design and early customer collaboration.
See here for a PDF of the slides.
