5 surprising things item pickers can pick

You’ve probably noticed that item pickers can lift unexpected items these days. From picking pineapples to handling traditionally “hard-to-pick” items, the possibilities have expanded far beyond just simple, uniform items.

Thanks to AI vision technology, today’s item pickers are smarter, faster, and more versatile than ever before. With over a decade in the pick and place industry, our Smart Item Picker has evolved has evolved to reliably handle even the most challenging products.

In this article, we’ll explore five surprising product types our robots can pick, along with real-world examples and insights into how it all works.

1. Soft and fragile clothing items 

Loose clothing is known for being notoriously difficult for item pickers to pick. Fabrics are usually fragile, which is why garments are often packed in thin plastic bags. That’s not only just for protection but also to provide them with a more defined shape for easier handling.

For robots, that plastic layer is both a help and a hurdle. It creates a reliable surface for suction or gripping, but the reflections the plastic layer can give can confuse traditional vision systems.

This is where our Smart Item Picker stands out. With advanced 2D and 3D AI vision, it can accurately detect and lift clothing items – even through reflections. For online fashion retailers, this means faster, more reliable order fulfillment and smoother operations during seasonal peaks.

2. Shiny, transparent items

Items like pens, pencils, or even toothbrush sets may look simple to us, but for robots, they’re surprisingly tricky. Reflective or see-through packaging can confuse vision systems, making it difficult to detect edges or grip points. Add in curved shapes or slippery surfaces, and the risk of a ‘”mispick” increases.

With advanced AI vision and 3D sensing, the Smart Item Picker overcomes these hurdles. It can filter out glare, understand depth, and choose the most secure way to grip each item. For industries such as stationery or consumer goods, where shiny or transparent packaging can be used, this means automation can finally be both reliable and efficient.

3. Oddly shaped & colorful toys

For robots, toy picking is unsurprisingly complex. Toys come in every imaginable shape, size, and material. Usually, that means no two items look the same on a conveyor belt or in a tote.

Packaging makes it even trickier. Colorful boxes can reflect light and make grip points harder to see. With AI vision and machine learning, however, the Smart Item Picker can recognize this wide variety and adjust its grip strategy on the fly.

This flexibility is especially valuable for toy manufacturers, distributors, and e-commerce warehouses, where fast and reliable picking is critical during seasonal peaks like the holidays.

4. Protective gaming cases

For robots, even something as straightforward as a rigid protective gaming case can be harder to pick than it looks. These cases are often wrapped in glossy cardboard sleeves that reflect light and hide clear grip points.

In real-world conditions, like cluttered tote bins or overlapping products, such design makes detection and gripping a real challenge.

With advanced AI-driven vision and adaptive gripping, the Smart Item Picker can reliably detect edges on shiny packaging and choose secure grip points, even from mixed-item tote bins.

5. Lotion, shampoo and beauty products 

Beauty products often come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and packaging types, which makes sense considering they’re designed to appeal to a certain type of target audience. However, this may pose a challenge for item pickers and challenge them to handle it in distribution centers.

Automated item picking offers a reliable solution by using advanced gripping and vision technology to identify and handle these products accurately without causing damage. For the beauty and personal care industry – where high volumes, frequent promotions, and fast-moving consumer demand is the norm – automated picking is especially relevant in enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective logistics operations.

Why this matters

Automating item picking is a major challenge for many logistics and e-commerce businesses. Concerns like “Can it really handle all our different products?” or “What happens if an item can’t be picked?” are understandable. That’s why advances in deep learning AI and 2D/3D vision technology, like those used at Smart Robotics, are so important. They make it possible to reliably pick a wide variety of items – helping businesses improve efficiency, reduce errors, and keep operations running smoothly.

Watch this video to understand how item pickers choose what to pick and how to pick it:

The video in short: our AI agent makes decisions based on the highest probability of success, using both 2D and 3D data.

In this video, you will see that the largest and highest item in the tote was picked first. The 3D color map then guides the robot’s pick order:
1. Green – pick first!
2. Yellow
3. Orange
4. Red

After each pick, a new image is captured to prepare for the next.

In short

What once seemed too delicate or too complex for an item picker is no longer a challenge. With the support of AI agents and advanced 2D and 3D scanning, robotic arms can now accurately determine how and where to pick an object, making automation more reliable than ever.