Jul 22, 2026 · 15 min · 10 segments
Why do so many warehouse robots fail to make it beyond pilot projects? Ariana Eisenstein, Founder & CTO of Pickle Robot, joins Code the Future to discuss the challenges of building robots people…
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Yeah, so Pickle Robot is a physical AI company working on automating areas of supply chain logistics, starting with our unload product.
And this is maybe a little bit more than a five-year-old, but we really see ourselves as a systems company.
We really want to develop a full product that covers the whole product, the whole need, and not sort of bolting AI on at the end, but really utilizing it to solve the problem where it's most effective.
And how did you come up with the idea initially for the company? What was the gap in the market that you saw that you thought, hey, we can do this better?
Yeah, so we actually started with in 2018 when we were founded, my co-founders and myself were looking at the work and manipulation coming out of academia and seeing that robots were finally able to use their hands in a way that didn't take these long planning pauses.
What can we accomplish in the market? We looked at tons of industries across agriculture and industrial.
And actually an investor tipped us off to go check out the logistics space.
And we ended up in a warehouse at 11 o'clock at night on a tour and watching people unload these packages and talking to the warehouse workers, hearing them say, I've only done like none of us have been here longer than 90 days.
And my co-founders and myself kind of talked to each other and we said, thinking about these advances in manipulation, you know, if you could get a robot to unload one of these parcel trucks, you could get a robot to do anything.
And this was actually a problem that when we started talking to customers about it, even in those early days, they said, we've been trying to automate this since the 80s.
Yeah, so Pickle Robot is a physical AI company working on automating areas of supply chain logistics, starting with our unload product.
And this is maybe a little bit more than a five-year-old, but we really see ourselves as a systems company.
We really want to develop a full product that covers the whole product, the whole need, and not sort of bolting AI on at the end, but really utilizing it to solve the problem where it's most effective.
And how did you come up with the idea initially for the company? What was the gap in the market that you saw that you thought, hey, we can do this better?
Yeah, so we actually started with in 2018 when we were founded, my co-founders and myself were looking at the work and manipulation coming out of academia and seeing that robots were finally able to use their hands in a way that didn't take these long planning pauses.
What can we accomplish in the market? We looked at tons of industries across agriculture and industrial.
And actually an investor tipped us off to go check out the logistics space.
And we ended up in a warehouse at 11 o'clock at night on a tour and watching people unload these packages and talking to the warehouse workers, hearing them say, I've only done like none of us have been here longer than 90 days.
And my co-founders and myself kind of talked to each other and we said, thinking about these advances in manipulation, you know, if you could get a robot to unload one of these parcel trucks, you could get a robot to do anything.
And this was actually a problem that when we started talking to customers about it, even in those early days, they said, we've been trying to automate this since the 80s.
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