Palletizing & Truck Unloading

Returnable containers of different shapes and stacking patterns arrive mixed, and three people unloaded them.

Two depalletizing robots running MujinOS with 3D vision (announced September 2026).

From three staff to none, handling about 5,000 boxes a day.

About 23,000 items a day across 56 SKUs ship in bread crates, each needing a shipping label.

A MOTOMAN-HC10 cobot senses four crate types to supply, discharge, and stack them; a MOTOMAN-MPP3S delta robot applies 3,000 labels an hour. Part of a METI demonstration program (FY2017).

Staff 5 → 2, productivity 2.5×, payback 1.8 years.

Manually unloading cartons inside hot or cold trailers was a safety burden and hard to staff.

First commercial deployment in North America in January 2023; Stretch picks cartons one by one onto a conveyor. Since expanded to the UK and Europe.

Unloading up to 700 cases/hour; in May 2025 DHL agreed to deploy 1,000+ more units and extend to case picking.

Manual unloading of trailers and containers is heavy work and hard to staff during peak seasons.

Agreement signed September 2023; Stretch installed at Hermes Fulfilment in Haldensleben in under a week.

Autonomous unloading frees staff for higher-value work; Stretch planned for 20+ sites and Spot for 10+.

Baked pastries and croissants go into trays, and wrapped loaves into cases.

IRB 340 robots pick four napolitanas at a time into trays (100/min); six IRB 340 with vision handle croissants; an IRB 1600 case-packs seven loaves at once.

Croissant tray-packing runs at 640–1,020 per minute.

Two people moved bagged loaves and rolls from the conveyor into shipping crates; clear bags are hard for cameras to locate.

KINE Robotics built a system in which a Stäubli TS2-60 with a ToF 3D camera tracks and picks bags on the moving conveyor.

Handles 25–30 bags a minute, replacing the two-person task.

Two million small boards a year must be placed into trays, and the trays into boxes.

A UR5 with a custom gripper places three boards at a time into 54-board trays, then boxes and closes them, across three shifts.

Productivity +25%, payback in 18 months.