Operator (OP1)

Operator OP1 is a stationary dual-arm robot from Ultra, a Brooklyn start-up founded in 2024, and it works in US e-commerce warehouses today. Instead of an autonomous base it has locking casters: a worker rolls it to a workstation, locks it in place and plugs it into an ordinary 120 V outlet drawing up to 10 A at peak; connectivity is 10 Mbps Ethernet.

Each arm lifts up to 10 lb, about 4.5 kg, and the reach extends from floor level to about 3 m. The robot occupies a 5 x 5 ft footprint and serves a working area of up to 10 x 10 ft. Tasks are packing, sorting, kitting and returns processing around the clock. Neural networks learn from teleoperation data, and experience is shared across the entire fleet.

Ultra runs three-month trials after which customers scale up; according to the maker the robots are active in warehouses in New York, Georgia, New Jersey and Texas. The number of arms, degrees of freedom, gripper type, height and weight are not published, nor is the price, which is on request. It is a borderline humanoid: a torso with arms but no legs and no head.

A similarly stationary, though research-oriented, machine is Y4, which shows how different the goals of the same layout can be.