This new warehouse robot from Tesla alums could kill the forklift - Fast Company

The warehouses of the world are surprisingly empty spaces. These essential nodes of the intricate global goods movement system are packed with stuff, but they also include a significant amount of empty floor space between their racks. It’s there to accommodate the workhorse of the warehouse—the forklift—which needs room to maneuver as it lifts and carries pallets topped with hundreds or thousands of pounds worth of goods. The forklift gets a dumb and dangerous job done, but requires a lot of room to do it.

A new robotics startup sees a better way to run a warehouse. Mytra, founded by alumni of Tesla and Rivian, is aiming to consolidate and automate warehouse operations through a robot and storage rack system that makes the movement of goods more efficient. It could also render the forklift obsolete.

The system is both simple and complex. Made up of a pallet-size robot and a matrix of three-dimensional steel cells, Mytra uses software and custom-designed mechanics to pick up and move items, optimizing how they’re stored and speeding up the process of getting them in and out of the warehouse.

“We wanted to go after the most simple problem in all of the industry, which is just moving things around from one place in the factory or warehouse to another,” says Mytra cofounder and CEO Chris Walti, who notes that those in-warehouse moves make up between 40% and 80% of the work in a typical facility. It’s something he experienced firsthand in his previous job running warehouse logistics at Tesla, which, like many warehouse operations, relied on forklifts and racks of pallets.

|

Walti saw the need for a better way. And in another role as head of Tesla’s humanoid robot project, Optimus, he also saw the potential for new robotics and automation technology to help. Along with Ahmad Baitalmal, who led factory software at Tesla and Rivian, Walti launched Mytra. The company’s system works within a cage-like grid of cells, with a robot uniquely designed to move around in 3D and carry loads of up to 3,000 pounds. Mytra’s first system began operations for the Albertson’s grocery store chain last month.

This is not entirely new territory, as warehouse robots are already carrying and moving goods for companies from Amazon to DHL. But Walti says Mytra’s approach automates much more of the movement and operations that take place in a typical warehouse, which tends to involve creating what are known as mixed pallets. “Going around the warehouse, workers are basically doing a shopping run. And that requires a ton of manual labor. It’s backbreaking [having] to go to every station and . . . lift a case of Coca-Cola or a bag of concrete,” Walti says. “Our system can automate the bulk of this.”

Walti says the robot at the heart of this system represents a major leap forward for the industry. “There is no mobile robot that can move more than 100 pounds in the vertical dimension,” he says. Mytra’s vertical load limit of 3,000 pounds is possible through a combination of the steel grid system that makes up its racks and a custom-designed screwdrive mechanism at the robot’s four corners that uses mechanical leverage to climb and descend.

The grid system itself is part of the company’s differentiating factor, doing away with the space-wasting aisles required by forklift-based warehouse operations. And because of its cellular design, the rack system can be configured in any size or shape. The first installation for Albertson’s consists of 36 cells. Walti says Mytra is in talks with other customers for potential applications that amount to thousands or even tens of thousands of cells. “We’re applying software reconfigurability to physical space,” he says.

Mytra’s robot-based system could reshape the typical warehouse. But it may not mean the total end of the forklift’s reign, Walti says: “Forklifts are still really good at . . . loading things in trailers and stacking pallets on a dock. This just provides the need for a lot fewer of them.”