The United States Postal Service recently was granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark office for “Methods and Systems for in-route item sorting and packaging.”

In the patent, USPS explains that a sorting robot would have the “means for grasping items and moving them between the item storage bins.”

Furthermore, “The robot may assemble item packages from [a] plurality of individual items based on addresses of the items.”

The robot then would be able to shrink wrap the items, “forming the items into a package that is easy to deliver to a single address.”

Here is the perspective view of an exemplary freight bay as provided in a drawing by the USPS in its patent.