Mujin TruckBot
Mujin · Japan · 2023
A telescoping unloading robot that crawls 52 feet into a floor-loaded trailer and pulls out up to 1,000 mixed-SKU cases an hour without a mast, a base or an arm in the usual sense.
TruckBot is Mujin's answer to the one job in a warehouse that resisted automation the longest: emptying a floor-loaded trailer or sea container by hand. Mujin announced it on 17 March 2023 and showed it working at ProMat in Chicago the following week, after what the company describes as more than six years of development. The machine's form is unusual enough that Mujin calls it unconventional in its own announcement. Instead of standing on the dock as an arm on a base, TruckBot attaches to the telescoping conveyor that most loading docks already have and rides it into the trailer, reaching up to 52 feet (about 15.8 m) from the dock door. A suction head with multiple gripping channels pulls cases off the wall of the load — several at a time when the pattern allows — and drops them straight onto the conveyor running underneath, so the robot never has to carry a box back out. Cases may weigh up to 50 lb (about 22.7 kg) and the load may be mixed-SKU and irregularly stacked, which is the normal state of a floor-loaded container. The intelligence sits in MujinController, the motion-planning platform the company built its business on. The controller plans paths and picking strategies in real time rather than replaying a taught sequence, which is what allows the robot to work on a wall of boxes it has never seen before, and to keep working as that wall changes shape. Mujin's launch figure was up to 1,000 cases per hour; when TruckBot was named to The Robot Report's RBR50 list in 2024, the figure quoted there had risen to 1,500 cases per hour. TruckBot is sold as part of a wider Mujin cell rather than as a standalone product — at ProMat it worked with a Mujin palletizing robot and autonomous vehicles that carried the finished pallets away. Mujin does not publish a price, and today's product site presents truck unloading as one application of the MujinOS platform rather than as a separate catalogue page.
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