Exotec's climbing robots turned storage racks into the conveyor belt

Warehouse picking is the part of e-commerce that scales worst: as order counts multiply, pickers walk more, and the classic fixes are a conveyor-and-crane automated warehouse that must be designed upfront and rebuilt at every expansion, or more people. Renault's spare-parts operation was a version of this problem — order processing took two hours because warehouses were fragmented and organized by part type rather than market, and France, 37 percent of the parts business, had no regional distribution hub.

Exotec, founded in June 2015 near Lille by Romain Moulin and Renaud Heitz — veterans of robotics firm BA Systèmes and GE — took a different build with its Skypod system. Robots climb free-standing racks in three dimensions, up to 46 feet high at four meters per second, carrying 30-kilogram bins, and can also drive beneath the racks in any direction. The racks themselves are passive steel; the robots are the only moving parts. Bins arrive at goods-to-person stations so pickers stop walking, and conveyors link storage, picking and dispatch.

The numbers held up at scale. Renault's Villeroy warehouse runs 167 Skypod robots, 14 picking stations and 67,000 storage bins at 10.8-meter rack height, processing 4,130 bins an hour and over 1.6 million items — cutting order processing from 120 minutes to 15, consolidating over 80 percent of French business into one site, and dispatching orders placed by 5:30 PM for next-day 8:00 AM delivery. GXO's Venlo site for Guess pairs 127 robots with 60,000 storage locations and eight goods-to-person stations, peaking at 2,200 order lines per hour and 40,000–70,000 pieces per day.

Storage racks become the conveyor: robots climb them in 3-D

The storage rack is the cheapest structural element in a warehouse; making it do the routing — robots climb it — removes conveyors and fixed cranes.

Robots moving in three dimensions on an open frame spread traffic vertically instead of competing for the floor like ground robots.

Capacity scales by adding racks and robots, so deployment starts small and grows without shutting the warehouse.

Goods-to-person stations eliminate picker walking, the least productive motion in fulfillment.

Exotec acted as integrator — storage, robotics, picking and conveying in one system — which let GXO add e-commerce flows without redesigning the warehouse.

Put the motion in the cheapest moving part. The racks are passive and stackable, the robots are the only moving machinery, so expanding a warehouse becomes addition, not reconstruction.

Exotec expanded beyond French e-commerce into fashion, spare parts and third-party logistics across Europe and beyond, growing into one of France's few industrial unicorns. Renault extended the partnership to Germany, deploying 89 Skypod robots at a new automated warehouse in Brühl to supply dealers nationwide — Renault's first automated warehouse in that country. In 2026, GXO put 127 robots into Guess's Venlo distribution center, adding e-commerce fulfillment for the Benelux region to an operation that has run for Guess since 2017, all without a full warehouse redesign.