Kindred Powered by Ocado Group announced plans to develop INDUCT, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered robotic system designed to automate the small parcel induction process.
“Kindred INDUCT is a highly-intelligent robotic system that modernizes induction processes so customers can meet the breakneck pace of consumer demand for e-commerce shipments,” says Marin Tchakarov, CEO of Kindred. “The proprietary Kindred CORE/AutoGrasp reinforcement learning platform is continuously improving, becoming smarter, faster and more efficient as it learns from millions of picks across our fleet of deployed robots every day.”
From Yahoo! Finance:
- The INDUCT workcell will help parcel, post and e-commerce fulfillment companies alleviate capacity shortages and increase efficiency.
- Built on Kindred’s proprietary CORE/AutoGrasp AI platform, the INDUCT robotic system is a high-speed workcell that identifies items and determines how to handle them, a process known as induction. It accurately picks, maneuvers and places items onto a moving belt, bomb bay or tilt sorter. The platform combines AI-powered machine vision, grasping and manipulation algorithms to handle parcels of varying size, fragility and materials.
- Numerous INDUCT workcells can perform collaboratively along the same fulfillment line for maximum productivity and integrate with many different communication protocols, customizations and customer and warehouse management systems.
“AI and reinforcement learning is in Kindred’s DNA and embedded in all our products. Those capabilities enabled us to quickly solve the engineering challenge of automating induction – a more challenging process than picking and sorting due to the unstructured and unpredictable dynamics of handling parcels,” says Anne Marie Neatham, COO, Kindred.
