Walmart-owned Flipkart has introduced around 100 robots in one of its delivery hubs in the outskirts of Bengaluru. According to the company, these robots will be helping in packages and streamline its supply chain.
The robots, which are automated guided vehicles, will be working in a tight grid and use collision avoidance technology to ensure free movement. Similarly, it will be responsible for picking products from a conveyor belt, scan them and drop them down a chute that is assigned to a particular pin code. The company also has plans to deploy automated vehicles in other delivery hubs across the country.
However, Flipkart has also ensured that this move will not cause a loss in jobs of the people. The company will instead increase the capabilities of its human workforce by getting more value-added work by them. In order to do this, Flipkart is already running reskilling programmes for its employees.
“The big problem that we want to solve with automation in e-commerce is supply chain,” Krishna Raghavan, SVP, tech, eKart told to The Economic Times. “We want to solve for precision, we want to solve for scale and we want to solve for efficiency. All of these aspects are important for us if we want to reach the next 200 million customers.”
As of now, the robots will be able to sort over 4,500 packages in an hour, which is 10 times more than a single human would achieve at the same time. The product can also be increased by five times with minimal increases in infrastructure and the addition of more robots.
Pranav Saxena, VP – Robotics and Automation, eKart, said that the system was developed along with vendors. He also explained that the system would be beneficial for the Indian ecommerce market as the companies record a higher number of orders, especially during sale periods.