Order Picking

A picker walks a route through aisles, reads a pick list or a handheld screen, finds the location, pulls the right quantity of the right item, scans it, and puts it in a tote. Thousands of SKUs, bins at every height, items that are bagged, boxed, loose, fragile, or heavy. Speed is measured by the hour, and accuracy is measured at the pack station.

The hands do most of the work. Reaching into a bin and picking out three of something without disturbing the rest. Grabbing a case from a top shelf with a step stool. Pulling a single bottle from a shrink-wrapped tray. The picker also decides when a bin is wrong, when an item looks damaged, and when a count is short, and flags it before moving on.

Picking style depends on the operation: discrete picks, batch picking into a multi-tote cart, zone picking with handoffs, or cart-to-conveyor flows. Each one changes how the picker moves and where the hands go.

Episode segmentation diagramONE EPISODE01Navigate02Locate03Grasp04Confirm05PlaceEACH STEP: LANGUAGE LABEL · OUTCOME TAG · OPTIONAL HAND / OBJECT TRACKS
A typical order picking episode, cut into the steps your labels attach to.

We put a head camera on the picker and fixed cameras in the aisles and at the pack handoff, all synchronized. The footage comes from full shifts in real warehouses in five countries, with consented, paid pickers, and it is cleared for commercial training. For the researcher, every pick is an episode: approach, locate, grasp, scan, place, with plain-language labels on each step. Success or failure tags come from the warehouse system's own accuracy check. Hand, item, bin, scanner, and tote tracking is available on request. Your bucket, your schema, with a manifest listing every episode in the batch.

A sample of this task, annotated, can be with you in a business day.