Yandex plans to conduct pilot projects in the warehouses of Russian retailers by the end of 2026. The company said:
It performs up to half of all the actions needed to complete the cargo before sending it to the store — it moves around the warehouse, selects the necessary boxes on pallets and takes them to the finished order area. The robot allows employees to focus on other tasks, such as forming orders and shipping finished pallets.
In the future, such robots will have more opportunities — they will be able to serve different areas of the warehouse and process volumes comparable to the work of a picker per shift.
It is based on a mobile platform from an inventory robot and a manipulator with a vacuum grip. The robot received cameras with a computer vision system: they allow you to recognize objects, assess their depth and position.
According to the developers, the mobile picking robot works at the pace of a human and moves around the warehouse under the control of the Yandex RMS platform. The system calculates the optimal route and directs the robot to the desired racks. Then, the picking robot uses a manipulator to lift boxes of different sizes and stack them on a pallet according to the "Tetris" principle. In the future, the robot will be able to scan barcodes and pack the pallet for shipment to the store.