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Vanderlande is now an integrator of the RightPick system. | Source: RightHand Robotics

RightHand Robotics, a company that creates autonomous picking robots, and Vanderlande, a robotics integrator and subsidiary of Toyota Industries, are partnering to add the RightPick 3 system to Vanderlande’s smart item robotics portfolio of technologies. The companies plan to deploy the system in general merchandise warehouses and distribution centers on a global scale.

Vanderlande provides logistic automation at airports, as well as in the warehousing and parcel sectors. RightPick will join the company’s portfolio of picking offerings, which includes smart item robotics, automated tote picking and goods-to-picker workstations.

“We are pleased to be included with the Smart Item Robotics (SIR) portfolio of technologies,” Leif Jentoft, CSO and co-founder at RightHand, said. “Warehouses are under increasing pressure to accelerate order fulfillment as ecommerce orders continue to rise. We look forward to helping Vanderlande meet the needs of customers worldwide and are honored to meet their standards for advanced automated picking.”

Vanderlande chose RightPick because of its real-world successes in warehouses. The platform is able to pick and place individual items in a variety of fulfillment center processes. RightPick is made up of a Universal Robots collaborative robot arm with an end effector that uses both suction and mechanical fingers to grasp items. The platform uses a vision system and control software with machine learning as a form of hand, eye coordination, providing accountability for picking success.

“The market wants integrated robotics that work, so we’ve tested the world’s leading robot solutions,” Terry Verkuijlen, Vanderlande’s vice president of warehouse solutions, said. “Our findings showed that RightHand Robotics’ use of gripper technology, vision systems and software algorithms is the best fit for automated general merchandise warehouses.”

As part of the partnership, Vanderlande is joining RightHand’s Partner Integrator Network. RightHand’s other integration partners are Element Logic, Manhattan Associates, Tompkins Robotics, Okamura and SVT Robotics.

In February 2022, RightHand raised $66 million in Series C funding. The most recent round brought the company to $119.3 million raised over six rounds.

RightHand Robotics’ co-founder and CEO Yaro Tenzer was on The Robot Report Podcast in August 2021. Certainly a lot has changed for the company since that appearance, but the conversation sheds light into the
capabilities of RightHand’s innovative picking solution and much more. You can listen to that interview below.