Sorting

Identifying items on a conveyor or in a bin and routing each one to a different destination by type or address.

Sorting is a fundamental operation in logistics and manufacturing: identify an item, by reading a barcode or recognizing its category or appearance, then route it to the corresponding chute, bin, or conveyor. Traditional sortation relies on fixed equipment such as cross-belt or tilt-tray sorters combined with barcode scanning, and works well for regular boxes; irregularly shaped soft packages and mixed, jumbled items still rely heavily on manual labor. Robotic sorting must first pick a single item out of clutter, then decide where it goes and place it, involving visual recognition, grasp planning, and choosing between a suction cup or a gripper. It is one of the deployment scenarios embodied-AI companies most often showcase — Amazon's Sparrow, for example, can identify and pick individual items in a warehouse, and in February 2025 Figure demonstrated a humanoid robot moving packages from one conveyor to another and turning each shipping label to face the scanner.

ExampleFigure's humanoid robot, using its Helix model, picks boxes and soft packages one at a time off a logistics line, reorients each shipping label, and places the item on another conveyor to be scanned.

Also called

Parcel Sorting, Item Sorting, Sortation

Related

Bin Picking · Order Picking · Pick-and-Place · Tote Handling · Real-world Deployment · Vacuum Suction Cup

Sources

Sortation - Wikipedia
Helix Accelerating Real-World Logistics (Figure AI, 2025-02-26)
Amazon introduces Sparrow (About Amazon)

As of

2025-02