Logistics Hall of Fame: Inventors of the Mobile Robotic Fulfillment System are honored

The successful trio will be officially inducted into the Logistics Hall of Fame at a gala reception on December 5, 2024 at the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport in Berlin.

"Mountz, Wurman and D'Andrea can claim to have made the goods-to-person picking concept the global standard for many e-commerce and omnichannel processes. For many companies, mobile robotic fulfillment systems are the technological basis for same-day delivery as we know it today," says Anita Würmser, Executive Jury Chairwoman of the Logistics Hall of Fame, explaining the decision of the expert jury, which includes 70 well-known personalities from business, science, politics and the media from 13 nations."

The concept of mobile robotic fulfillment systems: Logistics employees no longer walk along shelves looking for orders, but autonomous mobile robots (AMR) move a shelf with goods to the picking stations. Mountz, Wurman and D'Andrea played a central role here with the company Kiva Systems, founded in the USA in 2003, and numerous developments for it.

Patented system developed

The demise of e-commerce provider Webvan in 2001 provided the impetus: Mountz attributed the decline of his former employer to inflexible intralogistics systems and high order processing costs. So he came up with the idea of developing a method for picking, packing and shipping orders that could deliver any item to any logistics employee at any time. To make this a reality, he sought the help of AI and software expert Peter Wurman and robotics and AI pioneer Raffaello D'Andrea and founded Distrobot together with his two colleagues in 2003. In 2005, this became Kiva Systems. Together they developed the patented mobile fulfillment system Kiva (US patent number 8,649,899).