Challenge

The growth of e-commerce is leading to the explosion in shipments composed mainly of small packages. To increase competitiveness handling such small boxes has to be automatised.
Bin-picking systems are widely used in industry, but these systems exploit a CAD of the objects to perform the localisation and compute a suitable grasping point. Unfortunately, this approach is not feasible with packages and parcels because they have different sizes, colours, and shapes, and could be deformed, therefore they do not have a reference model to localise them.

Impact

The automatisation of the handling and sorting of small packages and envelopes in small and medium-sized delivery facilities allows for managing the increase in shipments while reducing costs.
The resulting package localisation technology has a widespread interest in other logistics-related applications such as depalletising for intralogistics and logistics and sorting of boxes from conveyor belts. Furthermore, the localisation of model-less objects can find wide application in other sectors such as the food industry for the manipulation of fruits or vegetables.