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Piece picking for e-commerce order fulfillment poses several challenges for robotics engineers. Throughput, accuracy, reliability, and versatility are key requirements. While some companies have struggled to train robots to handle a wide variety of items, XYZ Robotics has developed end-of-arm tooling that it said is tolerant of sensor errors while significantly increasing productivity: a spear tool head, its JY tool changer, and a bag cup for grasping plastic bags packed items, . At Automate 2019 , the Allston, Mass.-based company introduced its XYZ Rebinning Station (XRS) and XYZ Picking Station (XPS). The XRS is an autonomous robotic turnkey system for putwall sorting, and XPS is a robotic piece-picking system for goods-to-person transport. Tooling for speed and reliability Using computer vision and machine learning to recognize thousands or millions of stock-keeping units (SKUs) is only part of the challenge. Many robotics suppliers are still working on training robots and end-of-arm tooling to handle items of different shapes, sizes, materials, and orientations. “Picking for putwall sorting involves mixed items, so goods-to-person and goods-to-robot operations can’t depend on homogeneous totes,” noted Peter Yu, chief technology officer of XYZ Robotics . “Our vision system and tooling make it easier to handle challenging cases at high speed.” For example, as robotic arms reach into bins, they can be knocked off center by objects in the way of their objectives and could even damage goods, he said. The company’s compliant tool head can be pushed out of alignment and automatically spring back into place. This helps avoid costly downtime to manually reset the robot, Yu added. XYZ Robotics’ JY tool changer is magnetic and has a self-centering head, allowing for swaps of less than half a second. Once XYZ’s vision system has identified the item to be picked, the robot arm can go to the […]