UC Berkeley spinout Ambi Robotics announced Tuesday the arrival of AmbiStack, a novel system that automates pallet packing.
The system features an industrial robotic arm mounted above a conveyer belt that moves along the X and Y axes and lifts boxes up via suction cups mounted to a gripper. Once lifted from the conveyer belt, the boxes are tightly packed into pallets, which are used to ship or store packages. industrial packaging corporation
The AmbiStack is notable because it combines two key warehouse operations into a single workflow, by both picking and stacking. Both are time-consuming and have been known to cause injury among human workers. Earlier solutions, such as forklifts, have introduced their own injury risk into the workplace. AmbiStack, meanwhile, effectively removes the human worker at these key stages of the logistics process.
Ambi’s solutions focus on both the hardware and software sides of the equation. AmbiStack’s AI offering was trained on more than 200,000 hours of warehouse data, according to the company. That field experience helps the system analyze, track, pick, and place a variety of package sizes.
Presales have already opened for the new system, with the first deployments expected to arrive in mid-2025. Ambi also plans to expand its own manufacturing processes in early-2026 to meet demand.
Ambi was founded in 2018 by UC Berkeley students and lead robotics professor, Ken Goldberg. The firm’s earlier solution, the AmbiSort A-Series, operates in a similar fashion, albeit with smaller parcel packages, which are sorted into bins. That process requires significantly less precision than stacking. The AmbiSort B-Series was released in 2023 with the ability to handle as many as 1,200 sorts in an hour.
Ambi’s AI-driven systems have helped the robotics startup bring in more than $67 million in funding from investors like Tiger Global and Bow Capital. High-profile shipping services have deployed Ambi’s Systems, including Pitney Bowes, which signed a $23 million expansion deal with the firm in 2022.
Ambi is one of a large number of warehouse/fulfillment robotics firms that greatly benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic. Initial shutdowns led many logistics companies to invest in automation. A continuing struggle to staff those roles in the intervening years has maintained such interest.
Of course, these opportunities mean that Ambi is far from alone in the space. Among its competitors are Pickle, Righthand, and Hai Robotics, along with Covariant, which was co-founded by Pieter Abbeel, another UC Berkeley robotics professor. That technology has since been integrated into Amazon’s automated systems. Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics has entered the space, as well, with its second commercial robot, Stretch.
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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