Flipkart Introduces Automated Guided Vehicles at its Sortation Facility in Bangalore

The company also plans to build a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Robotics & Automation to drive innovation and research in this space.
India’s leading e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has introduced the country’s first robot-based sortation technology, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), at its Soukya sortation center in Bangalore.
Designed to optimize efficiency and precision on the back-end of the supply chain, the AGVs help sort packages by pin code.
Flipkart said the technology will help the company meet ever-growing customer and scale demands, ensuring faster delivery and an enhanced experience for online shoppers.
Over 100 AGVs launched at Soukya sortation facility
The Soukya set-up now involves over 100 self-guided bots that automatically sort packages to the right customer pin codes by identifying encoded information on each package.
At present, the facility has around 1000 employees and processes lakhs of shipments a day. The company said that the AGVs will work in conjunction with facility staff, who will be trained in operating the bots.
Tests conducted by the company indicate deploying 100 of these AGVs can lead to over 60 percent increase in process efficiency.
As per the company, the set-up can process up to 4,500 shipments in an hour and can be scaled over 5x with minimal changes. The other advantage is that they can be easily moved across locations as well.
Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Robotics & Automation
Flipkart also plans to partner with startups and university campuses to drive innovation and research in automation and robotics space.
The company announced that it will build a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Robotics & Automation, which will bring engineering, product, and automation teams under one umbrella.
In the future, the CoE will also focus on IoT and electric vehicles, it said.
Sharing his views on the launch of the AGVs, Krishna Raghavan, Senior Vice President of eKart Tech at Flipkart, said, “With the Automated Guided Vehicles, we are re-imagining new growth paths while orchestrating new and innovative ways of working. We believe this will help bring efficiencies, agility, and scale to the supply chain operations, helping us serve the customer better.”
He added, “This India-first initiative is the first stepping stone in this journey. Going forward, we will be looking at how we can help build the country’s nascent automation ecosystem through R&D and collaboration so we can continue building India-specific solutions.”