Tote Handling

The task of picking up, moving, and placing standard plastic totes (storage bins) in warehouses and on production lines.

A tote is the standard plastic storage bin used to hold parts or goods in logistics warehouses and factories. Tote handling means taking a tote off a shelf, a cart, or a collaborative robot arm and moving it to a conveyor, a workstation, or another storage location, sometimes including stacking and unstacking totes as well. It is one of the most common and repetitive jobs within material handling: totes are a uniform size, the motion involved is fairly fixed, and there is a reasonable margin for error, which is why a number of humanoid robot companies have chosen it as an early deployment scenario. Compared with retrofitting a conveyor line or adding dedicated equipment, a humanoid robot's selling point is that it can slot directly into a workstation previously staffed by a person, though cycle time, continuous run duration, and reliability remain the main things customers evaluate.

ExampleIn June 2024, logistics company GXO signed a multi-year robots-as-a-service agreement with Agility Robotics, under which Digit humanoid robots move totes handed off by a collaborative arm onto a conveyor at a SPANX warehouse.

Also called

Material Handling

Related

Palletizing / Depalletizing · Machine Tending · Sorting · Humanoid Robot · Real-world Deployment · Robot-as-a-Service

Sources

Agility Robotics – Solutions (Tote Handling)
GXO signs industry-first multi-year agreement with Agility Robotics

As of

2024-06