Chinese robotics specialist Libiao Robotics has teamed up with German technology group Körber to deliver robot technologies to Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

The core business of Libiao Robotics is focused on parcel sorting after order picking. The company researches artificial intelligence and automation for logistics.

It has developed a range of sorting robots, especially for table-top sortation, and designed intelligent sorting systems to meet the needs of different industries and businesses across the globe.

In the past five years, the company has deployed more than 15,000 sorting robots around the world, covering postal, supermarkets, shoes and clothing, medicine, catering, cold storage, jewellery, education, factory manufacturing, and books and publishing industries.

With the increase in ecommerce and order volumes in general, warehouses are finding it difficult to improve efficiencies and quality while also facing capacity and space constraints. By adding Libiao Robotics’ autonomous mobile sorting robots to the mix, Körber says it can offers the flexibility and scalability that modern businesses need to meet consumer expectations and adjust to seasonality or other peaks.

The tabletop robots only require a small physical area and can be rapidly deployed, reconfigured and scaled up, making sortation automation more accessible and flexible than traditional fixed automation, from micro-fulfilment centre to large-scale sortation depot.

“We are very happy to be able to further extend our relationship with Körber beyond Australia and New Zealand,” said Xia Huiling, CEO of Libiao Robotics. “Körber is a company with very strong integration capabilities. The cooperation with Körber will help the development of Libiao’s global strategy.”

The global Covid-19 pandemic is changing market structures and trends. The impact of the pandemic and the rapid growth of ecommerce have prompted reforms in the logistics and supply chain fields. Faced with labour shortages and sharp increase in health risks, the challenge of the logistics and supply chain system to turn to automation is more urgent.

The flexibility and scalability of the sorting system are also higher to adapt to the changing and diversified market needs and difficulties.

“This means that highly flexible sorting has a broad application space, and the cooperation between the two parties is very promising,” said Huiling.

Anton du Preez from Körber added: “With Libiao Robotics’ tabletop sortation AMRs, we are lowering the barrier to entry for automated sortation without sacrificing scalability. As volumes increase, additional robots can be cost-effectively added, and can be easily reconfigured or relocated as the business changes. What’s more is that our extensive integration experience enables us to reliably integrate these robots with our customer’s back-end systems.”

And Nishan Wijemanne, global head of AMR at Körber, said: “In a competitive logistics environment where flexibility, adaptability and precision are everything, robotics bring a new level of performance to your warehouse floor. The opportunity to deploy Libiao’s sorting robots along with our existing AMR portfolio gives our customers the strategic advantage of deploying efficient, low-cost and a rapidly deployable fulfilment, thus achieving faster last-mile delivery.”

Libiao Robotics is headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and integrates logistics automation with R&D, production and sales of intelligent equipment. With nearly 20 years of experience in automation and control technology, the R&D team started to work on intelligent sorting robots in 2014.