Hardware Podcasts

309: How Physical AI Is Changing What's Possible in Warehouse Automation

Manufacturing Happy Hour · 3 Nov 2026 · 36m

AI in practice: one real use of AI described

What this episode covers

Josh Cloer, General Manager of Nomagic, and Onur Uranli, Director at Intelligrated, discuss how physical AI is transforming warehouse automation, contrasting the rigid precision of factory assembly lines with the high-variability environment of distribution centers. They explain that while manufacturing automation is mature, warehouses are playing catch-up by adopting flexible robotics and vision-language-action models to handle unpredictable items and recover from downtime. The guests emphasize that successful automation requires a holistic system design starting from the manufacturing floor, rather than treating pallet variability as a downstream problem to be fixed by expensive point solutions.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationNomagic

Nomagic uses a vision language action model to enable robots to recover from downtime by analyzing items in front of them and reacting in real time.

“we're able to recover, uh, from, you know, downtime scenarios with these, uh, this vision language action model where the robot is literally just looking at the items in front of it and trying to figure out what went wrong and how can I, in this moment, you know, react and move the, the, the system to, to solve this problem.”

Speaker 1 · Hear it at 9:58

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Nomagic, Intelligrated, MHI, PTC
Also
TRG, ASRS

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