Brightpick, a leading provider of robotic automation for warehouses, is unveiling Gridpicker, a high-throughput grid-based fulfillment system run by AI-powered mobile manipulators, built on the company’s widely deployed Autopicker technology.
A New Standard for Warehouse Automation
Seventy-five percent of today’s automated storage and picking market is handled by legacy shuttle systems, despite many new technology entrants. At the same time, shuttle systems require time-consuming installation, high capital costs, and considerable infrastructure. In response to this market gap, Brightpick envisioned Gridpicker as a new paradigm – one that combines AI-powered mobile manipulators with the simplicity of a high-density grid design and cost advantages of the company’s proven Autopicker platform. The result is an AI-powered solution that delivers up to twice the throughput per unit area versus shuttle systems, while maximizing labor savings and storage density.
Gridpicker unlocks the full potential of every warehouse and reduces the need to build costly new facilities by delivering:
- Maximum throughput: delivering greater throughput per square meter than any AS/RS system, including shuttles – up to 10 order lines per hour per square meter
- Maximum storage density: achieving the highest space utilization, rivaling cube systems – up to 12 meters (40 feet) in height
- Maximum labor savings: automating the entire fulfillment process with mobile robotic picking, buffering, sortation, and consolidation to enable up to 95% labor savings
“We created Autopicker to help operators achieve major cost and labor savings while keeping operations flexible,” said Jan Zizka, co-founder and CEO of Brightpick. “As deployments scaled, we saw that a large segment of the market, mostly high-volume fulfillment centers, needed far more throughput and performance than AMR systems could deliver. So we created Gridpicker by essentially taking our Autopicker robots and placing them on a high-density grid. It combines shuttle-level throughput with the simplicity of AMRs, delivering up to 40% lower cost and requiring 5x less labor than shuttle systems.”
The Grid That Picks for You
Gridpicker is the only system whose cost decreases as automation increases. As more SKUs become suitable for robotic picking, each mobile manipulator becomes more productive and fewer robots are required to achieve the same throughput, reducing system cost. In contrast, traditional systems must add expensive robotic picking cells to increase automation levels, which increases cost and complexity. Gridpicker, by comparison, was designed from the ground up for robotic picking. Having completed over a billion picks in live production, Brightpick has built a significant AI data advantage that will continue to increase robotic pickability rates over time, further strengthening Gridpicker’s performance and cost advantages.
Gridpicker embodies the same proven mobile manipulation architecture, fulfillment logic, software stack, and embodied AI models as Autopicker, which is already operating at scale across hundreds of customer deployments. Gridpicker travels above shelves on a fixed aluminum grid structure and picks directly from storage totes sitting at the top. Carrying two order totes at once to further increase productivity, each robot delivers 100+ picks per hour, offering much higher efficiency than traditional Goods-to-Person systems. Gridpicker also comes equipped with Brightpick Fetcher robots; lightweight robotic trays that travel on fixed rails attached to the shelving, bringing totes from storage to the top shelf for access.
At its core is Brightpick Intuition, the company’s AI-powered orchestration software that acts as the digital brain of the warehouse. By maintaining a real-time digital twin of the operation, Intuition coordinates fleets of robots, optimizes task allocation and movement, and enables robots to perceive, plan, and execute tasks with human-like adaptability.
End-to-End Fulfillment
Gridpicker enables fully automated lights-out warehouse operations in a single, unified solution, eliminating the need to integrate and consolidate multiple disparate systems. Built on the proven Autopicker platform, Gridpicker handles the full range of SKU velocities from the fastest movers to less frequently picked items. The ability to handle individual items and full cases, including robotically pickable and non-pickable products, makes Gridpicker also suitable for omni-channel and B2B operations. Built-in order buffering and sortation further streamline outbound flows, unlocking lights-out overnight shifts with zero staffing.
Brightpick | brightpick.ai
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Kirsten Campbell is a Marketing Tornado and junk robot of information. Analytical and creative, she has been in marketing and communications since 2008 and worked with everyone from small businesses to your favorite household names.
Ask her about the time she made a numismatics blog interesting (yes, really) or wrote an obit for a family she never met.
An ardent admirer of corporate snark played out online, Kirsten loves Reese’s peanut butter cups and still isn't over the Mars Rover.
