RightHand Robotics enters Japanese market

BOSTON –  RightHand Robotics (RHR), which provides integrated robotic piece-picking solutions, has partnered with Paltac Corporation, a Japanese consumer packaged goods wholesaler. The collaboration will introduce RightHand’s newest piece-picking solution to the Japanese market, with multiple workstations to be installed in Paltac’s newest facility, RDC Saitama, opening later in 2019 in Sugito, Saitama Prefecture, Japan.

Japan represents a huge and growing market for automation as the world’s second-largest retail sector, with annual sales exceeding US$1.3 trillion.  Paltac sought a robotic piece-picking solution to further automate operations by picking and placing items of varying size, weight, and shape. The  leadership team chose RightPick, which can reliably pick and place a range of items, including never-before-seen objects, at a high rate.

“Our RDC Saitama facility will stock over 20,000 SKUs every year,” said Masakazu Mikita, general manager of research and development at Paltac Corporation.

“In order to handle such a large number of different and densely packed items, we needed a piece-picking solution that combined advanced gripping systems with continuous machine learning and unerring reliability. RightPick met all of our high-level requirements; we’re confident in the system’s ability to successfully pick a wide variety of items without prior knowledge or programming.”

Driven by the rapid shift to online shopping and the growing demands of e-commerce order fulfillment, RightHand’s RightPick platform addresses these challenges with integrated AI software and gripping hardware that can handle the repetitive task of picking and placing individual items within various customer workflows.

“We are thrilled to be working with Paltac and to introduce our solution to the Japanese market,” said Leif Jentoft, co-founder of RightHand Robotics. “As Paltac continues to grow and expand operations, RightPick will be a valuable contributor to their business strategy. We’re very excited for the opportunity to implement our latest technology in their new facility.”

RightHand Robotics was founded in 2014 by a DARPA challenge-winning team from the Harvard Biorobotics Lab, the Yale GRAB Lab, and MIT.