Freespace Robotics’ Versatile Modular Cube System
Article from MHI Solutions Magazine
Automation is powerful in theory, but when a material handler confronts irregular shapes or sizes, that theory can become difficult to execute. MHI member Freespace Robotics—winner of the ProMat 2025 StartUp Pitch Competition—aims to solve that problem with an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) designed to handle an unusually wide range of product dimensions.
The ProMat win brought a surge of interest and validation, said Karl Sanchack, chief operating officer. “As a startup there’s a certain amount of validation that comes from having outside authorities in the material handling space looking at our solution and identifying why it stands out in the industry.”
Although the system has not yet been deployed in a live facility, the visibility from the competition has generated “inbound interest from a number of large entities from ecommerce all the way out through automotive manufacturing and assembly,” Sanchack said. These conversations, he notes, “could help with our internal opportunities and challenges,” and the exposure was “quite a bit to us as an entity, more than we could have expressed on our own…”
