Brightpick sees Gridpicker as new ‘picking paradigm’

OCADO FILED a German court injunction against Brightpick’s GridPicker system alleging patent infringement to prevent its display at March’s LogiMAT exhibition in Germany. The solution is unavailable to customers in Germany but is available elsewhere.

Brightpick envisions Gridpicker as a new paradigm – one that combines AI-powered mobile manipulators with the simplicity of a high-density grid design and cost advantages of the company’s proven Autopicker platform. The result is an AI-powered solution that delivers up to twice the throughput per unit area versus shuttle systems, while maximising labour savings and storage density.

“We created Autopicker to help operators achieve major cost and labour savings while keeping operations flexible,” said Jan Zizka, co-founder and CEO of Brightpick. “As deployments scaled, we saw that a large segment of the market, mostly high-volume fulfillment centres, needed far more throughput and performance than AMR systems could deliver. So we created Gridpicker by essentially taking our Autopicker robots and placing them on a high-density grid. It delivers shuttle-level performance with AMR-level simplicity at 40% lower cost compared to shuttles, delivering the most flexible, scalable, highest-throughput AS/RS for demanding warehouse environments.”

Brightpick claims Gridpicker delivers:

• Greater throughput per square metre than any AS/RS system – up to 10 order lines per hour per square metre
• Storage density to rival cube systems – up to 12 metres (40 feet) in height
• Up to 95% labour savings

Multiple customers have already ordered Gridpicker, with first installations scheduled for later this year.

Brightpick claims Gridpicker is the only system whose cost decreases as the share of robotically pickable items increases. As more SKUs become suitable for robotic picking, each mobile manipulator becomes more productive and fewer robots are required to achieve the same throughput. In contrast, traditional systems must add expensive robotic picking cells to increase automation levels, which increases cost and complexity. Gridpicker, by comparison, was designed from the ground up for robotic picking.

Having completed over a billion picks in live production, Brightpick has built a significant AI data advantage that will continue to increase robotic pickability rates over time, further strengthening Gridpicker’s performance and cost advantages.

Architecture

Gridpicker embodies the same proven mobile manipulation architecture, fulfillment logic, software stack, and embodied AI models as Autopicker, which is already operating at scale across hundreds of customer deployments. Gridpicker travels above shelves on a fixed aluminum grid structure and picks directly from storage totes sitting at the top. Carrying two order totes at once to further increase productivity, each robot delivers 100+ picks per hour, offering much higher efficiency than traditional Goods-to-Person systems. Gridpicker also comes equipped with Brightpick Fetcher robots; lightweight robotic trays that travel on fixed rails attached to the shelving, bringing totes from storage to the top shelf for access.

Intuition

At its core is Brightpick Intuition, the company’s AI-powered orchestration software that acts as the digital brain of the warehouse. By maintaining a real-time digital twin of the operation, Intuition coordinates fleets of robots, optimises task allocation and movement, and enables robots to perceive, plan, and execute tasks with human-like adaptability.