Greece’s post sorting centre in Athens introduces autonomous robots

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The Hellenic Post has introduced a fleet of autonomous robots to its post sorting centre in Athens to speed up the sorting process.

City authorities headed by Mayor of Athens Kostas Bakoyannis noted that the move is in line with the city’s digitalisation efforts.

The Athens centre has a fleet of 55 autonomous robots that scan postal codes, weigh packages and sort them, with the Hellenic Post pointing out that the investment is part of its digital restructuring programme.

The move was planned during the coronavirus crisis in response to a growing number of online shopping orders.

George Constantopoulos, CEO of Hellenic Post, noted “until recently, sorting has been carried out by manual labour with a high demand in time, often with errors occurring, causing delivery delays for our customers and increased costs for the company.”

Robots now handle up to 80% of parcel sorting, which has speeded up the process significantly and ensured next-day delivery, he stressed. They can sort more than 150,000 parcels of up to 15 kilograms per day and recharge for five minutes every four hours.

“The purpose is not to replace human workers with robots, but rather to augment human workforces and make them more efficient, Constantopoulos concluded.