Cainiao's warehouse runs 135 climbing ZeeBots, logging 140km vertical in one Singles' Day
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-11-06
Machine Heart tours Cainiao's Zengcheng Tesco warehouse in Guangzhou, where 135 ZeeBot climbing robots navigate 20-tier, 9-meter racks holding 42,000 totes across 2,000 sqm. During the Singles' Day rush (3x daily outbound volume), the robots logged over 140 km of vertical travel in 28 hours with a 99.99% on-time wave-fulfillment rate.
Key points:
- ZeeBots climb at 1.2 m/s using dual grippers on standard racks — no dedicated rails; one robot handles both horizontal and vertical movement, cutting handoff failures and enabling capacity scaling by simply adding robots;
- Long-tail SKUs go to the robot zone while 10k high-turn SKUs stay manual; each workstation outputs as much as 2-3 pickers, with storage efficiency 3x and labor efficiency 2.5x over the pre-retrofit warehouse;
- Scheduling algorithms pre-compute track occupancy at task assignment and re-plan routes at millisecond granularity, re-matching totes to slots by product heat;
- Robotic-arm fine picking across 30k SKUs is in very early training; LLMs help surface optimization opportunities.
The piece frames this in the lineage from Walmart's satellite network to Kiva's fulfillment robots.
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