Autonomous Mobile Warehouse Robot
Built by Mohammed Zayed
Warehouse picking accounts for 55-65% of total warehouse operating costs, yet the majority of small and mid-size Canadian warehouses remain completely unautomated. Existing solutions like Locus Robotics and 6 River Systems target large enterprise clients, leaving thousands of smaller operators with no viable option. We are building an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) designed specifically for small and mid-size Canadian warehouses. The robot follows a human picker through warehouse aisles, carries a tote of picked items, and autonomously returns to a packing station when the order is complete — requiring zero infrastructure changes to the existing warehouse. The prototype uses a Raspberry Pi 4, RPLidar A1 for SLAM-based navigation, and an OAK-D Lite camera with onboard AI inference for real-time person detection and following. The software stack is built on ROS 2 and Nav2. Our target customer is the 10-30 person warehouse currently doing fully manual picking with no existing automation. The business model is Robotics as a Service (RaaS) at $1,500-2,500/month per robot; immediately justifiable against a single warehouse worker salary of ~$45,000/year in Ontario.