E-commerce marketplace Flipkart has introduced India's first robot-based sortation technology, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), at its sortation facility in Bengaluru. These robots can sort 5,000 parcels every hour, as against 450 parcels sorted by humans in the same duration.

These AGVs charge themselves automatically after their battery exhausts every eight hours. "The throughput which these (robots) are providing is almost 10x of what we would have achieved. These robots talk to each other in real time, whether it is to (prevent) collision or for workload distribution," Pranav Saxena, Vice-President, Robotics and Automation at Flipkart told Business Standard.

More than 100 robots have been introduced in Flipkart's Soukya sortation centre in Bengaluru and they are being seen as a milestone in automation.

"The Automated Guided Vehicles help bring efficiencies, agility and scale to the supply chain operations, helping us serve the customer better. This India-first initiative is the first stepping stone in this journey," Krishna Raghavan, Senior Vice President of eKart Tech at Flipkart said.

The 1,000 employees of the facility manage millions of shipments every day and they have been trained to operate the AGVs. These robots can drive up efficiency in the facility by 60 percent and process 4,500 shipments in one hour, according to tests conducted on them. They can also be transferred to other sortation locations easily.

This may help Flipkart in advancing other services like speedy deliveries and customer experience. It would be assumed that this automation will turn the manual jobs redundant. However, the company said its employees can now be upskilled and add further value to the company.

The e-commerce giant aims to work with startups and universities to advance its research avenues. It is building a dedicated centre of excellence for its robotics technology and automation.

Walmart-owned Flipkart's main competition Amazon has already been working on automation since 2014 and it recently tested its delivery bots.