JD Logistics puts a dual-arm robot inside its Nanny Wolf sorter, rated at 34,560 items an hour

JD Logistics has added a dual-arm robot to Nanny Wolf, the sorting system in its Wolf family of warehouse robots, and says the upgraded line can sort more than 34,560 items an hour at peak, about 9.6 a second. It showed the system at the CeMAT ASIA logistics exhibition on Nov. 5, IT Home reported. The robot sits at induction: it recognizes each parcel, flips it and puts it into the line with the shipping label facing up, MyDrivers reported. With it, JD says, Nanny Wolf runs unmanned from induction through sorting, bin changes and packing.

The robot is a station, not a worker. JD rates the throughput for the whole line, where two independently running induction decks feed the dual-arm robots and an automatic system swaps bins up to 180 times an hour. It is a narrower job than the one JD gave AgiBot's Genie G2 Max in its Zhilang warehouses last month, where the robot was rated at 80 cases an hour depalletizing and 75 palletizing, with a success rate above 99%. In both cases JD sets the task and builds the system around it, and the embodied AI robots fill gaps in machinery it designs itself.

Zhilang now picks a bin every 15 seconds

The other upgrade went to Zhilang, JD's goods-to-person system, in which lift robots pull bins from shelves up to 12 meters high and carry them to pickers who stay at one station. JD says it runs in more than 100 warehouses worldwide and raises storage efficiency by 600% and outbound efficiency by 300% over a conventional warehouse. A new rotating pickup platform does more than 240 operations an hour, one every 15 seconds, which JD puts at 30% faster, and supports double-deep storage for 20% more capacity. Wireless power replaces contact rails, and the system works at -20°C. The Wolf family now counts 9 products and 11 robot models, scheduled by one model JD calls Super Brain.

The 34,560 figure is a peak for a line with two induction decks. How many dual-arm robots it takes to hold that rate, and what each one costs against a person turning parcels over, is what decides whether other warehouses buy the station or JD keeps it for its own.