Robotics startup Ambi Robotics has raised US$32m (£30m), which it claims it will use to deploy a ‘new type of robot’ into e-commerce warehouses.
The company’s signature robot is Ambisort A-Series V3, which reportedly occupies 375ft² (34.8m²) of warehouse space and features a blue articulated arm equipped with a five-camera vision system and three kinds of suction cups. This arm was designed to pull an assortment of envelopes, plastic bags or lightweight boxes from a bin.
Next, the arm hands off each parcel to a second robot, which then passes over a gantry of mail sacks and chooses the correct one to drop it in, with parcels being sorted according to postcode.
According to Ambi, the Ambisort can process about 400 parcels per hour and that humans only work at one-third of this pace and are more prone to error.
Ambi Robotics both developed the system and the accompanying machine-learning algorithms that allow the robot to recognise each parcel and select the right way to handle it.
The company claims to have deployed 80 of these systems, with ambitions to surpass 100 during the next year.
This recent financing round came from a range of equity firms, namely Tiger Global, Bow Capital and the UK’s Ahren Innovation Capital. E-commerce logistics firm Pitney Bowes has also been announced as both an investor and a customer.
