Rapyuta Robotics · Warehouse robotics

How do you make pickers faster without making them think?

In a Japanese distribution centre, robots roll bins to a picker who barely looks up. A projector paints light onto the right compartment, a scanner reads from the palm of a hand, and a screen has a fraction of a second to say pick this, here, this many before the person is already moving again. The work was to design that screen, and the whole OKS flow behind it, so a picker could trust it at a glance, gloved and mid-stride, and never stop to think. Built from zero, it roughly doubled picking productivity and won a Good Design Award.

RoboticsOn-device UI0→1Field researchGood Design Award 2023

Studying the floor

Weeks in live warehouses surfaced the moments that quietly cost time: the double-takes, the re-scans, the small hesitations that multiply across a shift of thousands of picks.

A hierarchy you read at a glance

Whatever comes next became the single biggest thing on screen, so the right instruction arrived before the picker had to look for it.

Designing for gloves, light and speed

Targets, contrast and motion were tuned for cold hands and peripheral vision, working with the put-to-light projector and palm scanner across receive, pick, drop-off and recheck.

The outcome

The interface shipped into production across sites and became the reference for how the fleet talks to the people working beside it.

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