How Flipkart is automating its supply chain with robotics, machine learning

The e-commerce giant is using robots to automate its supply chain and bring the next 200 million customers online

Tucked away in a nondescript lane on the outskirts of Bengaluru, is the sorting facility of e-commerce giant Flipkart. Walking into the hangar-like building, you can hear grinding metallic noises. That’s the sound of hundreds of robots, or cobots, as they are called, working seamlessly with humans.

The human workers place the products on the orange-coloured robots, and the machines sort them after scanning the encoded information on each parcel and placing them in the designated bins. “It is cool working with them,” says Nakula Punji, one of the thousand-odd employees at the facility.

Earlier, Punji would pick up products that customers