Otto Group hands returns sorting in Poland to Sereact's AI robots, up to 25 arms in two phases

Otto Group and Stuttgart robotics software company Sereact said in a joint announcement on Oct 28 that they will put AI-controlled robots on one of e-commerce's hardest manual jobs: inspecting and sorting returned customer orders. Ten dual-arm systems go first into an Otto Group logistics centre in Poland. A second phase would add 15 robot arms, for a total of 25, depending on first results, and Otto Group will then weigh a wider rollout across its network.

The companies did not name the site, give a start date or state financial terms. Sereact said the robots will arrive in stages, each feeding operating data back into the system, and that staff will move from repetitive picking and lifting to supervision, exceptions and final quality decisions. Otto Group linked the project to a medium-term commitment to invest EUR 350 million in technology and AI.

How Cortex is trained for returns

Returns are hard because items come back folded, crumpled or repackaged and the product range never stops changing. Sereact says its Cortex model grasps objects it has not seen before and decides in real time how to pick, assess and route each item. Real picks from the line are turned into thousands of simulated variants in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, re-rendered with NVIDIA Cosmos world models across garment states, packaging and lighting, and post-trained on Blackwell GPUs before tested updates go back to the robots, which Sereact says cuts fixes from weeks to days.