Automation is coming to warehouses — fast. While some companies like Amazon are developing their own robotic fleets in-house, others have turned to outside players for their automation tech.

FedEx has dabbled with both strategies. And the $84 billion company has landed on partnerships with robotics companies as the best approach to keep up with its peers in the race toward automation.

FedEx’s recent multi-year partnership with SoftBank-owned robotics company Berkshire Grey illustrates its strategy: turn to the experts to develop robots that can take on repetitive, dangerous jobs for humans. Under the non-exclusive partnership, the companies developed Scoop, a bot designed for bulk package unloading, or removing large bundles of multiple parcels from a truck at once.

FedEx will start rolling out these robots to its warehouses through a pilot program later this year. While these robots won’t work with every single one of FedEx’s thousands of unloading doors, the company hopes to be able to scale the bot if all goes well.

Stephanie Cook, director of advanced technology and innovation, robotics, at FedEx, told TechCrunch that bulk unloading is one of the most physically demanding and unpredictable jobs in the FedEx warehouse. This isn’t the company’s first attempt to automate bulk unloading, Cook said, adding they had trouble finding the right robot for the job.

“There’s nothing that is off-the-shelf that we recognize will work for our needs,” Cook said. “We worked with Berkshire Grey in the past and felt this was a good fit for us in terms of a collaboration. We knew it wasn’t something that we could just develop in a matter of months. It was going to take a multi-year journey to get here.”

Bulk unloading is also a perfect role for a robot, O.P. Skaaksrud, vice president of advanced technology and innovation, at FedEx, told TechCrunch. While bulk unloading does require these bots to make decisions, they aren’t as granular as if the bot was picking or searching for specific packages, which makes it a less complicated task to automate.

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“Because we have such variety of package mix, to specialize individual picking, it’s just not gonna be fast enough,” Skaaksrud said. “That was one of the other tradeoffs that we went with here, because there are package unloaders out there that do single picks. They’re not fast enough and not able to do this type of mix.”

Cook said the company is looking to automate the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs at its warehouses first. These tend to be better for automation in general because they’re often repetitive, allowing employees to work less dangerous and more higher-skilled jobs.

Picking and packing partners

The Memphis-based company does develop tech in-house, like the FedEx SenseAware and SenseAware ID sensor systems, both of which help track packages.

But developing sensors and developing robotics are not one in the same, Skaaksrud said.

“The entire package and developing sensor hardware is complicated, but developing robotics capabilities is next level,” Skaaksrud said. “It’s much better and faster to partner with other companies in the field to move faster. That is the way we look at it. We see these partnerships as really benefiting both Fedex and the companies we work with.”

Berkshire Grey isn’t FedEx’s only automation-focused partnership. The company has locked in several partnerships (and conducted pilots) in recent years as it works toward automating more of its process in and outside the warehouse.

Within the warehouse, the company works with Dexterity, a robotics startup with the billion-dollar valuation unicorn status that specializes in robots with a “human-like” touch. It also has a deal with another unicorn startup called Nimble that builds fully autonomous warehouses.

Autonomous deliveries, both last-mile and long duration, are also an area of focus.

The company signed a pilot deal with autonomous trucking startup Aurora Innovation back in 2021 to have the self-driving truck compa

FedEx chooses partnerships over proprietary tech for its automation strategy