Nowaste Logistics from Helsingborg has become the first in the world to install a material-handling robot that can revolutionize the industry. Cognibotics HKM 1800, complemented with advanced AI from SICS, is set to deliver a new level of productivity and simplicity. The solution has been developed with the support of Vinnova and has attracted significant attention at the Automatica Fair 2023, where it showcased performance at an entirely new level.
Lund, Sweden, February 26, 2024 - Nowaste Logistics is known for being at the forefront of warehouse automation. The company's terminals serve customers from a variety of industries, from food to interior design and confectionery.
Nowaste has now chosen the Cognibotics HKM1800 material handling robot, reinforced with SICS AI's groundbreaking software, to validate the future solution for picking and placing. The pilot project has started in one of the terminals at the Tostarp logistics area.
Automated pick and place
Mats Jonsson, business area manager for HKM1800, says that with HKM's reach of 1.8 meters and speed of around 2000 picks per hour, we can create a whole new productivity in intralogistic picking. The robot's work area, which is a whole 10 square meters, can be the biggest customer benefit as it enables completely new and much better automation layouts in the warehouse.
Reach of 1.8 meters and speed of around 2000 picks per hour.
For example, surrounding equipment and material presentations can be built more simply but also more equipment can be reached for a greater degree of completion, i.e., customer benefit. The system is further equipped with a quick tool change, which gives the customer the ability to handle a large range of goods with varying weights, shapes, and sizes.
Furthermore, the collaboration with SICS AI and their innovative self-learning AI is extremely exciting as we have already been able to match the robot's high performance but also see how much easier it has become for the customer to handle a large amount of varied goods thanks to a smarter and faster AI.
"Of course, it is a feather in our cap to be the first in the world to sharply test something that has the potential to revolutionize the industry. There is great potential for both simpler integration, increased speed, and increased quality," says Bilal Charif at Nowaste Logistics.
Order picking is a known difficult-to-plan bottleneck in warehouse management since current pick and place robots often encounter limitations, especially in the unstructured environment of e-commerce warehouses, with rapid changes and wide product assortment.
Traditional AI systems are limited by the amount of training data
Karim Nouira, CEO at SICS AI, says that we need to reevaluate AI as we know it: "Traditional AI systems are limited by the amount of training data they require, which quickly becomes unsustainable when you have a large article variation to handle. Therefore, we have had to fundamentally challenge how conventional AI handles learning. The result is a completely new and significantly more autonomous product with an ability for almost human real-time learning, which has enabled a giant leap towards automation in environments where it has previously been challenging. In practice, the result means transforming a bottleneck into a competitive advantage for the user."
The collaboration between Nowaste, Cognibotics, and SICS AI is part of a larger project focusing on AI innovation that has been identified as a particular strategic focus area by Vinnova.
The installation at Nowaste Logistics marks an important milestone on the road to the goal of rolling out the solution on a larger scale on the intralogistics and warehouse market.
Press Contact
Cognibotics AB, Martin Sebek, KAM, +420 606 073 800
SICS AI, Liza Bogatyrev, CMO +46 735 30 90 05
Nowaste Logistics, Bilal Charif, Project manager +46 735 06 08 31