Robot Era's sorting robots peaked at 1,500 parcels an hour for China Post and SF Express on Double 11

Robot Era's sorting robots reached a peak of 1,500 parcels an hour during China's Double 11 shopping rush, handling mixed parcels and odd-shaped items for China Post and SF Express, NetEase Smart reported on Nov. 12. The Beijing embodied AI company says the system now runs in more than a dozen logistics centers.

The more useful figure is the one the robot lost on the way. In the lab it sorted 1,200 parcels an hour. On its first live lines, with irregular items, mixed flows and parcels lying any which way, that fell to 800 to 900, the company said, a loss of a quarter to a third. Robot Era closed the gap by training on data from experienced human sorters, which taught the robot to grasp irregular items and correct misplaced ones. The job takes 20 to 30 perception and action decisions a second, it says.

A shopping festival is built for peaks. At the World Robot Conference in August, Sina Tech reported the robot sorting about 1,200 an hour, with 2,000 in internal limit tests. Robot Era is now trying robots-as-a-service billed by task volume, so a customer facing a short peak can subscribe instead of buying hardware. Billing per parcel makes throughput Robot Era's problem. Co-founder Xi Yue expects industrial and commercial customers to scale within three to five years, and homes within five to ten. The rate in an ordinary week after the rush will show which of the three numbers Robot Era is selling.