Chinese AI-robotics company XYZ Robotics has switched on a fleet of its RockyOne depalletizing robots at BAUHAUS's central warehouse in Krefeld, Germany, taking over the DIY hypermarket chain's entire goods-receiving flow from shipping container to shelf-ready pallet in what is one of the largest robotic goods-receiving deployments in European retail.
End-to-end automated receiving
The system pairs XYZ's RockyOne mixed-case depalletizer with the smaller RockyOne SE for lighter cases, handling the full workflow: unloading pallets from inbound containers, singulating individual cases, sorting them onto shelf-ready pallets and buffering them for outbound shelf replenishment. XYZ said the deployment removes physically demanding lifting from the daily routine of BAUHAUS warehouse teams and improves operational consistency across the site's broad SKU catalogue, which spans building materials, tools, plumbing, garden and DIY consumables.
3D vision and adaptive gripping do the heavy lifting
Each RockyOne unit combines a six-axis industrial arm, 3D machine vision and an adaptive multi-suction gripper trained on more than a million SKUs of mixed cases, cartons and shrink-wrapped bundles. BAUHAUS said the platform copes with the extreme case-variability typical of DIY distribution — heavy paint tins next to lightweight garden fabric — without manual reprogramming.
European DIY retail joins the automation push
The Krefeld rollout adds to a wave of European warehouse-automation deployments this year, including Robust.AI's Carter deployment at O'Neill Logistics and Simbe's chain-wide store rollout with Homebase. For XYZ Robotics, BAUHAUS is a strategic reference customer for its European push after earlier deployments with Fortune 500 retailers and third-party logistics operators in North America and Asia.
Reporting based on coverage from XYZ Robotics, BAUHAUS, PR Newswire and Morningstar.