Nimble Robotics details uptake for its AI-enabled picking robots

Nimble Robotics, a robotics and e-commerce fulfillment technology company, today shared details on the rapid adoption of its solutions. Nimble also shared that it is working with many well-known brands including Best Buy, Victoria’s Secret, Puma, NFI/CalCartage, iHerb, Adore Me, Weee! and others.

Nimble robots, which use artificial intelligence (AI), are working as part of systems developed by some of the industry’s leading systems integrators and providers including AutoStore, Opex, Bastian, Swisslog, TGW and Kuecker Pulse Integration (KPI), Nimble also explained. The functionality of some of these live projects can be seen in a new video from Nimble.

Nimble has deployed fleets of robots in production within warehouse environments across the United States this year with existing and new contracts that can grow the fleet with over 200 more robots in 2022, according to Nimble. The Nimble robots have picked more than 15 million objects, across 500,000 unique products ranging from eye-liners, belts, body wash and loofahs to keyboards, mice, USB sticks and game-consoles to lingerie, hoodies, and footwear – everything from daily essentials to holiday gift favorites.

Over the past few years two challenges have stifled the adoption of pick and pack robots: robot reliability and technology integration challenges, Nimble explained. Ecommerce fulfillment centers hold millions of different products. Each of those products are different sizes, shapes, weights, textures, stiffnesses and fragility. Having robots that can reliably handle all of this variability has been considered by many to be impossible, Nimble added. Additionally, integration of technology into warehouse ecosystems including warehouse management system (WMS) software is a time consuming and painful process which can require changes to the WMS, according to Nimble. The company added that its offering solves these two critical challenges.

“Our robots use a variety of different grippers and supervised autonomy to reliably handle nearly any object or product that fits into a bin. Our AI learns what grippers work best on different objects and automatically switches its gripper to properly pick, pack and handle each object. Our technology has been proven to be reliable to 99.9% accuracy in production, but what’s often the most impressive and exciting product feature, in the eyes of our customers, is the way in which we seamlessly integrate our robots. It’s very fast and easy. Our AI-based integration requires no changes to the warehouse software whatsoever. It also costs nothing to implement. The AI interprets the already existing human operator interfaces to determine what items to pick and where to pack them. A full production integration can all be done in one day using Nimble’s AI Integration tool. When I say ‘one day, $0, zero code changes,’ it sounds too good to be true, but our customers will vouch for us,” said Simon Kalouche, Nimble’s founder and CEO. “This has been a significant competitive advantage allowing us to quickly scale. To my knowledge, we’ve now deployed the world’s largest fleet of eCommerce ASRS picking robots. More robots deployed means more proprietary data being collected. Just like with self-driving cars, more data means higher capability and reliability which further drives customer retention and happiness.”

“With logistics and fulfillment experience at Amazon, iHerb and other retail companies, I’ve worked with a lot of technology teams and the Nimble team is the most impressive robotics team I’ve ever worked with,” said Jonathan Styles, director of continuous improvement-lean at iHerb. “They are bringing to market bleeding-edge technology and solving extremely hard problems in a market that is struggling to find labor. We have over 20 Nimble robots today and plan to add more as we grow our fulfillment capabilities.”

“Nimble partnered with us last year during the COVID outbreak to help us safely fulfill orders in our warehouse. Together we became the first eCommerce fulfillment center in the world with fully robotic picking. The robots now handle our 25,000+ SKUs and can pick over 30,000 units per day,” said Gary Bravard, co-founder and chief business officer of Adore Me.

Since raising a $50 million investment in March earlier this year, Nimble has increased its team from 25 to 75 employees and quickly expanded its customer base. Its robots are deployed in warehouses across the country and will be playing a big role in helping fulfill millions of orders for the 2021 holiday season, Nimble added.