While Amazon has been using mobile and picking robots for years, most fulfillment companies are not yet using robots, let alone humanoids. Highline Commerce is a third-party logistics provider, or 3PL, that is among the first to put semi-humanoid robots to work with OP1 systems from Ultra Robotics Corp. Both companies are based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“In January 2020, I rented 200 sq. ft. in Chelsea,” recalled Richard Hurley, founder and CEO of Highline Commerce. “Then COVID-19 hit, and e-commerce got hotter. We rode the wave of growth. Our flagship location is in Brooklyn, and we’re also in Atlanta and Ohio.”
The company now serves up to 30,000 brands a month and has partnered with early-stage technology providers as it has grown, Hurley told Automated Warehouse.
“We looked extensively at ASRS, and we were early customers of picking and scanning automation from Rabot,” he said. “We couldn’t get the economics to work for mobile robots. It’s a bigger lift to standardize an entire warehouse versus a standardized packing station. Our Brooklyn facility has narrower aisles, and the ROI [return on investment] increases with square footage.”
Ultra Robotics scales manipulator deployments
E-commerce is one of the fastest-growing retail subsectors in New York, with 2.5 million packages delivered across the city each day. Amazon has more than 40 facilities in the region, where the costs of real estate and labor force every company to focus on efficiency.
Highline recently expanded from 27,000 to 60,000 sq. ft. (2,508.3 to 5,574.1 sq. m) in Brooklyn. It is filling up to 30% of its orders with a bimanual manipulator nicknamed “Fleetwood Pack” from neighbor Ultra Robotics.
The two-armed robots are on a fixed base with wheels and can run 24 hours a day without breaks, handling pick, tote, scan, and conveyor processes.
Founded in 2024, Ultra Robotics is already generating revenue with its robots, which are designed for rapid installation and handling small parcels, packaging, and kitting.
“About a year ago, we deployed our first robot,” said Jon Miller Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of Ultra Robotics. “We scaled up to three robots that packed or shipped 500,000 orders, and we learned how to make our hardware and software more affordable and reliable.”
Ultra announced its OP1 Operator this spring and expects 100 deployments by the end of the year. “The future will be a combination of industrial machines and lightweight, flexible robots,” said Schwartz.
How did Highline Commerce manage integration?
“Ultra managed the initial integration. Early on, we tested the robot in a demo environment,” replied Hurley. “Our WMS has an open API [application programming interface], but we found that there are many different kinds of WMS — it doesn’t make sense to do a custom integration each time. It makes more sense to interact like a human, so the robot browses the WMS as if it was a human packer.”
“The robot scans a tote, pulls up an order, scans it to verify, and triggers shipping-label creation,” he explained. “The hardest part is the packaging.”
What are the advantages of the humanoid form factor?
“We use other robots for box making and packing. There are tons of incredible machines, but they have a much larger footprint and are expensive and rigid,” Hurley said. “Square footage is valuable, and OP1 is not a dramatic investment and sits within our existing infrastructure. In a packing station built for humans, it can grab a box and a label without needing to change anything.”
The biggest process change that Highline Commerce made was to hire a robot manager. “I never thought I’d need one, but training packers to do it is a cool level up for them,” noted Hurley. “The biggest challenge is to make sure the robot is fed [products].”
Highline robots climbs steps toward full autonomy
Ultra Robotics has worked with Physical Intelligence to develop AI models with its own data.
“We’re very confident that teleoperation provides a pathway to high-level autonomy,” Schwartz told Automated Warehouse. “We’re figuring out how surpass human levels of speed and reliability. Simulation works fine for dancing and locomotion, but it is not good enough to accurately represent real-world manipulation.”
The level of autonomy depends on which brand Highline Commerce is handling.
“One does subscription floss heads, which are handled completely autonomously — there’s a status light on the robot,” Hurley said. “It didn’t start that way. Ultra had a guy teleoperate the system until it got the model to where it wanted. As a customer, it’s pretty wild to to watch the stages of autonomy, from working maybe 70% of the time at first to a level in the 90% range.”
“It was still moving jerkily, so Ultra worked on the model for a week,” he added. “One day, I came in, and the robot was moving very much like a human, and its team was stoked. It was a three-month turnaround from introduction to filling orders reliably. When I initially spoke with Jon, he said packing boxes would take two years, but a year later, we’re using robots to pack boxes all day.”
Highline is working with Ultra to train new skills, including multi-item orders, custom mailers, and apparel with full-page inserts. Schwartz said his company is focusing on improving throughput and reliability.
“It’s only as good as the feedback we’re giving,” said Hurley. “A couple of these tasks didn’t occur to me that we could do for smaller D2C [direct-to-consumer] brands with an autonomous robot. It uses special grippers to rip off the adhesive on an envelope and stick it down — it blows my mind. We work with many early-stage brands, and they come in and end up staring at the robots.”
Highline has deployed three systems in Brooklyn through a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model. It initially started with a per-order fee to incentivize Ultra to improve performance and has since moved to a monthly service fee, which encourages high utilization.
“I have an order for more robots for peak season,” said Hurley. “I’m actually counting on them for thousands of orders a day. Sixteen months ago, it was not a thing. We’ve come that far, that fast, so I’m bullish on the industry.”
Industry City is a growing tech hub
Both Highline Commerce and Ultra Robotics are based in Industry City, a 35-acre (14.1-hectare) hub for more than 700 technology, manufacturing, and logistics companies and 8,500 workers. Other notable residents include Alquist Robotics, Cohesive Robotics, Mobius Industries, and Tailored Industry.
“There’s been an e-commerce and tech renaissance in Brooklyn,” said Hurley. “Who’d think that New York would be a cheaper alternative to Silicon Valley? The president of Shopify called Brooklyn the ‘mecca of e-commerce,’ and there’s a great concentration of people starting brands here who are more open to trying something like humanoid robots.”
“It’s similar to China, where you have suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors all in one spot where people can talk and make things happen fast,” he added. “It’s a tremendous advantage for Ultra to develop rapidly in the real world and for us to ship thousands of orders per week with its robots.”
“For a long time, the story of New York was that you came here to sell things, not to make them,” stated Jeff Fein, senior vice president of Industry City. “That’s changing. The most physical, complex work companies do is happening inside the city itself. Manufacturing, fulfillment, and robotics are becoming New York industries again. And not just for retail.”
