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Success Story
With Zebra enabled advanced perception, Rebl’s warehouse robots achieve >99.7% picking accuracy
Established in 2018 and operating out of Sweden, Rebl Industries applies the latest advances in robotics and artificial intelligence to deliver warehouse automation at scale.
Zebra Success Story: Rebl Industries
Overview: Warehouse and Distribution Challenge
Rebl’s robots needed the ability to see and interpret their environment, enabling them to adapt on the fly while operating at industrial speed.
Benefits / Outcomes
- >99.7% accuracy
- 800–1,000 picks per hour
- ~30% improvement in overall warehouse throughput
- Over 99% system availability during operational hours
- Deployed robotic workmates in weeks instead of months
- Improved ergonomics by removing repetitive, heavy manual tasks
About Rebl Industries
Warehouses face increasing pressure to move goods faster while handling greater variation and higher volumes. Automation is essential to meeting these demands but delivering it reliably at scale remains a challenge. Established in 2018 and operating out of Sweden, Rebl Industries applies the latest advances in robotics and artificial intelligence to deliver warehouse automation at scale.
Rebl’s robotic “workmates” are designed to operate across warehouse operations, handling tasks such as unloading, depalletizing, picking, induction, and palletising at industrial speed. Rather than selling hardware, Rebl disrupted the market with a robots-as-a-service model, where customers pay for the work performed, not the machines themselves. “There’s no upfront capital expenditure, no risk—just results,” explains Nicholas Tengelin, Chief Executive Officer at Rebl Industries.
The Challenge
To make this model viable in the unpredictable conditions of real warehouses, Rebl needed more than mechanical precision. The real challenge was robotic understanding and decision-making.
In high-throughput picking and sorting environments, robots must cope with items that are constantly changing in position, orientation, and presentation—often partially obscured or moving at speed. Each interaction demands a split-second judgment to determine where an item is, how it can be handled safely, and what should happen next.
Traditional automation struggles here, relying on predefined rules and tightly controlled conditions. As soon as something deviates from expectations—new stock-keeping units (SKUs), mixed packaging, or small layout changes—performance drops or manual intervention becomes necessary. “No robotic system can operate effectively in advanced, real-world environments without perception,” Tengelin shares.
Rebl’s robots needed the ability to see and interpret their environment, enabling them to adapt on the fly while operating at industrial speed.
Zebra’s systems are a key enabler of our perception capabilities, giving our workmates the real-time vision and contributing to the intelligence they need to operate autonomously, safely, and at scale.
The Solution
For Tengelin, choosing the right collaborators was about more than technical capability—it was about working with companies that could actively help shape the solution as Rebl scaled. “Zebra Technologies and Photoneo offer a broad perception stack, with components across different verticals that come together well and provide the input we need,” he says. That collaboration was supported by OEM Automatic, Rebl’s machine vision distributor in the Nordics, who worked closely with Rebl, Zebra, and Photoneo, now part of Zebra Technologies, engineers to identify and integrate the right combination of technologies for customer deployments.
“Zebra’s technology is a key part of our perception stack,” says Tengelin. Zebra’s FS40 and FS42 Fixed Industrial Scanners capture barcode and identification data, while Photoneo’s MotionCam-3D cameras generate real-time 3D point-cloud data of the scene. That visual input is then processed using a combination of Rebl’s own operating system and Photoneo’s AnyPick AI technology, allowing the system to recognise objects and understand how they can be handled. “Combined with our proprietary software and artificial intelligence, it allows our workmates to identify items as they arrive, determine their position, dimensions, and type, and decide how each one should be handled,” he adds.
Rebl’s robotic systems continuously improve through shared learning across the company’s connected fleet. Real operational data is used to fine-tune AI algorithms and optimise operations over time. As a result, each robot benefits from the experience of others for further accuracy and speed.
The Zebra Difference: Outcome and Benefits
Rebl’s workmates can be deployed to customers in record time. In traditional automation projects, it can take months just to define requirements, followed by lengthy sourcing, development, and installation phases—often pushing go-live out by a year or more. Rebl’s approach replaces that complexity with standardised, pre-integrated systems, plug-and-play vision components, and freestanding workstations that require no facility modifications. “We’re typically live within weeks, not months,” shares Tengelin. “In many standard applications, especially when we’re deploying an identical workmate, we can often be up and running the same day.”
Being able to handle a wide variety of parcels and items at high speed brings a level of performance that is still new for much of the industry. “In operation, we’re consistently achieving throughput rates of 800 to 1,000 picks per hour, with accuracy exceeding 99.7%, at one of the busiest distribution centres in the Nordic region,” says Tengelin. “For many customers, seeing that level of automation work reliably in real warehouse conditions is a first. There are usually a lot of smiles around.”
With over 99% system availability during operational hours, Rebl ensures a continuous flow of items and parcels for its customers. “This improves throughput across the entire warehouse by around 30%, which significantly increases the return on investment for the customer’s overall automation infrastructure,” notes Tengelin.
Another important benefit is ergonomics. By taking over repetitive tasks and heavy lifting, Rebl’s robots reduce the physical strain placed on warehouse staff—work that people simply aren’t designed to perform day after day. This delivers clear health and safety advantages while helping create more sustainable working conditions on the warehouse floor.
Over time, Rebl’s robots begin to feel less like machines and more like part of the workforce itself as they augment and support teams on the ground. As teams see the robot taking on the heavy, monotonous, and hazardous tasks with ease and that they can focus on more complex work. “People often give them names, include them in organisational charts, and speak about them as colleagues. One customer even suggested that next Halloween, the robot should get dressed up too,” shares Tengelin.
As Rebl expands its product range, the company is also rolling out across additional European markets following its entry into the UK. “We already work closely with Zebra, Photoneo, and OEM Automatic to continuously push the limits of what’s technologically possible and improve performance every day,” shares Tengelin. “The relationship has been very fruitful, and we expect that it continues in that direction. Zebra’s systems are a key enabler of our perception capabilities, giving our workmates the real-time vision and contributes to the intelligence they need to operate autonomously, safely, and at scale.”
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