Pickle's Dill Works to Augment, Not Replace, Warehouse Workers — and at Breakneck Speed

Pickle Robot, a startup spun out of MIT, has unveiled a robot design it hopes will dramatically improve the efficiency of warehousing operations: Dill, a machine which uses its on-board artificial intelligence to work with human staff rather than replace them.

"At Pickle, we think of our robots less like Terminators and more like sled dogs. No one expects a team of dogs to run the Iditarod on their own," explains Pickle chief technology officer and co-founder Ariana Eisenstein of the company's approach, which flies in the face of typical warehouse automation efforts in seeking to augment human staff rather than replace them. "They'd run into trouble in just minutes."

"We designed people into the system from the get go and focused on a specific problem: Package handling in the loading dock," Pickle chief executive Andrew Meyer adds of Dill's origins. "We got out of the lab and put robots to work in real warehouses. We resisted the fool’s errand of trying to create a system that could work entirely unsupervised or solve every robotics problem out there."

"We've made the robot smart enough to roll up and do the job, eliminating the extensive customization and process overhauling that typically goes along with automation," Meyer says, “that means we can lower the cost barrier to adoption by as much as 90 percent and serve customers who might assume robotics is beyond their reach."

Dill, Pickle claims, is a proven design: In a real-world demonstration, the robot is shown unloading an unorganized trailer at the rate of 1,600 picks per hour — double the speed of its competitors like Boston Dynamics' recently-unveiled wholly-autonomous Stretch robot arm, which aims to break into the very same warehousing and logistics market.

There's one piece of information Pickle isn't quite ready to share yet, however: Nowhere on the official website will you find pricing information for a Dill of your own.