Pick and place automation for repetitive part handling

Moving parts between stations is the broadest category in automation and the easiest to get wrong, because the robot is rarely the hard part. How the parts arrive is.

Free, about two minutes, no phone number. You get an honest no when a robot is the wrong answer.

Who this is for

You have somebody transferring parts between stations all day, orientation matters, and the counts per hour are high enough that fatigue and repetitive strain are real concerns.

The signs this fits you

• A station whose whole job is moving parts from one place to another.
• Repetitive strain complaints or rotation schedules built around this station.
• High hourly counts where a missed or misoriented part causes downstream trouble.
• Parts that arrive in a consistent, structured way already, such as trays or fixtures.

What the cell looks like

The arm class follows the speed. A collaborative arm handles moderate rates; a SCARA class robot handles faster, lighter, more repetitive work. The gripper follows the part. The decision that drives cost is presentation: if parts arrive structured, in trays or on a fixture, the cell is straightforward. If they arrive in a heap, you are talking about vision guidance, and the budget changes shape.

What it costs and what it saves

Illustrative, and the spread here is wider than most because vision guidance roughly doubles the complexity of an otherwise simple cell.

Pick and place cells are usually justified on a mix of labor, ergonomics, and downstream scrap reduction. Because the equipment is often at the cheaper end, the ratio of integration to equipment is higher than people expect. Budget the project, not the robot.

When this is the wrong answer

• You need truly random bin picking on a starter budget. It is possible, and it is not cheap.
• Your rates demand delta robots and full guarding, which is a packaging line conversation rather than a cell conversation.
• Your parts change weekly and each change means new tooling.
• The station is not actually a bottleneck and the person does other valuable work around it.

What an engineer has to verify

This is the checklist that keeps every number above a range. None of it can be settled from a website, and all of it gets settled before anyone quotes.

• How parts arrive at the station today, in detail. This is the single biggest cost driver.
• Required cycle rate at peak.
• Orientation requirements and how tightly they must be held.
• Tolerance for the occasional missed pick, and what happens downstream when one occurs.
• Part variation across your full range, not just the sample on the bench.

Safety determinations are not on this list because they are not ours to make. Cell design, guarding, and the risk assessment belong to an independent certified integrator, every time.

What the research says

Peer reviewed work from our research library on this application. These are studies of other plants and other settings, not a prediction about yours, and the excerpts are the authors' own words. Every title links to the source so you can check us.

• Analysis and Observations From the First Amazon Picking Challenge Nikolaus Correll et al. (2016), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering

  From the abstract: “This paper presents an overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams.”

• Picking with a robot colleague: A systematic literature review and evaluation of technology acceptance in human-robot collaborative warehouses Frederic Jacob et al. (2023), Computers & Industrial Engineering
• What are the important technologies for bin picking? Technology analysis of robots in competitions based on a set of performance metrics Masahiro Fujita et al. (2019), Advanced Robotics

  From the abstract: “Bin picking is still a challenge in robotics, as patent in recent robot competitions.”

• Algorithm for Robotic Picking in Amazon Fulfillment Centers Enables Humans and Robots to Work Together Effectively Russell J. Allgor et al. (2023), INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics

  From the abstract: “This paper describes how Amazon redesigned the robotic picking algorithm used in Amazon Robotics (AR) fulfillment centers (FCs) to enable humans and robots to work together effectively.”

• A Bin-Picking Benchmark for Systematic Evaluation of Robotic Pick-and-Place Systems Hussein Mnyusiwalla et al. (2020), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

  From the abstract: “Pick-and-place operations constitute the majority of today's industrial robotic applications.”

The full pick and place, kitting and bin picking shelf has 14 works.

Real examples

See it run

Two clips of this job actually running, from two different manufacturers. Both are the makers' own marketing footage, showing a cell under good conditions with a part it was set up for, so watch them for what the motion looks like rather than as evidence of what your rate would be.