Grey Orange builds warehouse robots to make sure you get your online purchase on time

I am a big fan of How It’s Made – the documentary television series that aired on Discovery Channel. It’s not just because I am curious to know how things are created, but also because I love watching robots work on the assembly line in a precise manner. Robots have entered almost every aspect of the manufacturing process, improving its speed, consistency, and precision. They performs tasks that are dangerous or monotonous for humans. Now, even logistics and warehousing are being automated using robots. Gurgaon-based hardware startup Grey Orange is one of the companies on that frontier.

The startup initially launched in 2009 as an education and training company in the robotics space. Later on, it evolved into an industrial robot manufacturing company. Grey Orange builds robots that operate in the warehouses of retail, logistics, and ecommerce companies with the goal of enabling quicker deliveries and minimal errors. Faster turnarounds and few errors go a long way in helping these companies.

Co-founders of Grey Orange: Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli

Beep, Bop, Boop

The company was founded by Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta due to their mutual love for robotics. Kohli is a mechanical engineering graduate from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani. He was the founder and team leader of a humanoid program called AcYut at the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems at BITS Pilani. The program builds a series of humanoid robots called AcYut, one of the first developed indigenously.

Gupta, who studied mechanical engineering there, also joined the group. The group represented India at various robotics competitions across the world, winning a gold medal at the RoboGames 2010 held in San Mateo, California.

At present, Grey Orange has three types of products to offer. “All the three products have been created with the idea of reducing human intervention and resultant error in the entire process of order fulfillment,” says Kohli. Its three main robots are: the profiler, sorter, and butler.

The profiler is a high-speed dynamic dimension and weighing system. It captures the real volume, box volume, dimensions, and weight of parcels.

Grey Orange – Sorter

Sorter is a high-speed sortating system for package profiling and routing. It’s a mechanical system which segregates items based on a pre-defined logic. Commonly used by logistics and ecommerce companies, it can sort at average speeds of 3,600 packets and 7,200 packets per hour. It can also be integrated with a profiler.

Butler, meanwhile, is a storage and retrieval robot. It’s based on a new methodology called “goods-to-man”, which aims to minimize walking and searching by workers. Butlers move around warehouses like intelligent forklifts, carrying shelves stacked with various products to a floor assistant. He then scans the barcode to confirm the right items. “Butlers help a worker pick 500 items per hour, as compared to the frequency of 40 to 80 items per hour per person by the existing manual process,” claims Kohli.

Orange is the new grey

Robo wars