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Test with Mag­a­zino robots at Zalando suc­cess­fully completed

Expan­sion of robot fleet to follow

Press releases

29. August 2019

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Munich, 29. August 2019 — The Munich-based robot­ics com­pany Mag­a­zino has suc­cess­fully com­pleted its test project with the mobile pick­ing robot TORU at Zalando, the online plat­form for fash­ion and lifestyle. Now the expan­sion of the robot fleet and the move to a larger oper­a­tional area are on the agenda. At the test site in Erfurt, Magazino’s TORU robots were deployed par­al­lel to humans within the Zalando ware­house and respon­si­ble for the autonomous stor­age and retrieval of shoe boxes in shelv­ing racks.

The approval of the project con­sisted of a three-day per­for­mance and avail­abil­ity test. The robots had to prove their speed and reli­a­bil­ity. Markus Ruder, project man­ager at Mag­a­zino and respon­si­ble for the deploy­ment at Zalando, says: “We were able to exceed the require­ments in all areas. What makes us par­tic­u­larly happy is that the hard work of the past weeks has paid off so clearly”.

Carl-Friedrich zu Knyphausen, Head of Logis­tics Devel­op­ment at Zalando, says: “After var­i­ous assign­ments in Pick and Stow, the robots have clearly proven them­selves in our logis­tics test environment.” 

The robot fleet will now have a sig­nif­i­cant increase in size and a new loca­tion. The two robots from the Erfurt logis­tics cen­ter will now be deployed at Zalando’s Lahr site in south­ern Ger­many and will be rein­forced by six more TORU robots in the course of this sum­mer. The robots will ini­tially be put into oper­a­tion in a sep­a­rated part of the shoe area within the ware­house where they will be trained. In a sec­ond step, the robots will be con­nected to the ware­house man­age­ment system.

Laser scan­ners and 3D sen­sor tech­nol­ogy at the front and rear enable the autonomous robots to safely sup­port the employ­ees in their activ­i­ties while oper­at­ing in par­al­lel. If TORU reg­is­ters an employee or an obsta­cle on its route, it first slows down, stops in time and waits — or searches for an alter­na­tive route if the route remains blocked.

In 2018 Zalando put the first TORU robots into oper­a­tion in Erfurt: The robots sup­port “stow” (stor­age) and “pick” (pick­ing) oper­a­tions in the areas of shoe boxes. Their spe­cial skill: In con­trast to other automa­tion tech­nolo­gies, in which only entire load car­ri­ers such as pal­lets or crates can be moved, the mobile TORU robots uses approaches of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as well as 3D cam­era tech­nol­ogy and can thus rec­og­nize, grasp and trans­port indi­vid­ual objects. With these capa­bil­i­ties, they are also able to sup­port the chaotic stor­age sys­tem used in Zalando’s logis­tics centers.


Why Zalando invests in automa­tion and in which areas it is used.

Mag­a­zino GmbH devel­ops and builds intel­li­gent, mobile robots that per­ceive their envi­ron­ment and make their own deci­sions. These autonomous robots work along­side peo­ple and make processes in e‑commerce, fash­ion and pro­duc­tion logis­tics more flex­i­ble and effi­cient than ever before. With over 110 employ­ees in Munich, Mag­a­zino is the largest Advanced Robot­ics team in Europe. Magazino’s investors include Kör­ber AG, Zalando and Fiege Logistik.

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