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Brightpick, a maker of autonomous mobile robots, on Tuesday announced a lofty addition to its current line. The appropriately named Giraffe system is notable for its large, retractable platform capable of reaching up to 20 feet (6 meters) in height to pick items from warehouse shelves. It’s a novel approach to warehouses with ceilings well out of the grasp of both standard AMRs and their human coworkers.
Giraffe accomplishes the feat by way of a telescoping arm with three overlapping segments that measure 8.5 feet when fully stowed. Rather than constantly extending and retracting 11.5 feet at a time, the system is designed to work in tandem with the Kentucky company’s existing Autopicker robot. That AMR, which sports two supply bins, meets the larger robot halfway by extending up to 11 feet.
The system resembles the telescoping warehouse robots of the London-based outfit Dexory, though the latter’s “DexoryView” platform simply features sensors for scanning shelves. The Giraffe has the decidedly more difficult task of transferring the shelves’ contents.
Dexory’s primary competition for tall-shelf warehouse inventory are drone-based scanning startups like Gather AI, Verity, and Corvus. Actually lifting and moving payloads is, however, far too resource intensive for quadcopters, so they won’t likely be infringing on Giraffe’s turf any time soon.
A more apt comparison are the automated storage and retrieval systems offered by companies like AutoStore and Kardex. Their tightly-packed grid solutions are expensive to install, difficult to repair, and are generally less flexible with inventory sizes. Brightpick’s order picking solution, on the other hand, features AMRs cruising around and retrieving inventory from more traditional warehouse shelves.
BionicHive offers yet another solution in the form of its Squid systems, which ride on shelf-mounted tracks to retrieve inventory. Amazon invested in that Israeli robotics startup in 2022, as part of its Industrial Innovation Fund.
In the rapidly automating warehouse and logistics world, there’s plenty of room for a wide range of different form factors and solutions.
Brightpick is rolling Giraffe out for two major customers in 2025. E-commerce retailer The Feed will employ six Giraffes alongside 73 Autopickers at a Colorado facility. Medical supply firm McGuff Company is deploying a more modest four Giraffes and one dozen Autopickers at a warehouse in California.
Brightpick claims the Giraffe/Autopicker combo allows for 3x the warehouse density of manual, human-based operations, while doubling its own existing solution.
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
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