Highline Commerce Taps Ultra Robotics to Automate 30% of Fulfillment in Brooklyn Hub

Brooklyn-based 3PL Highline Commerce is now fulfilling up to 30% of its order volume using Ultra Robotics' humanoid systems.
Ultra’s OP1 "Operator" robot utilizes a stationary design to eliminate battery swaps and tipping risks, enabling continuous 24-hour operation.
By co-locating at Brooklyn's Industry City tech hub, Ultra Robotics can test and iterate its hardware on a live production floor rather than a decentralized lab.
The deployment follows a broader industry shift to validate robotic reliability in active commercial environments, reflecting recent milestones such as AGIBOT’s live factory integration.

Humanoid robots have officially hit the fulfillment floor in Brooklyn. Third-party logistics (3PL) provider Highline Commerce has integrated humanoid systems from Y Combinator-backed Ultra Robotics to handle up to 30% of its daily order volume. The robots are now managing the pick, pack, scan, and conveyor processes for over 200 retail brands.

The move establishes Highline Commerce as one of the first fulfillment companies to deploy humanoid-style robots for live, commercial retail operations.

A white and black Ultra OP1 robot operating in a busy warehouse, using its dual-arm end effector to pick items from a cardboard box while human workers move in the blurred background. — Deployed on an active fulfillment floor, Ultra's OP1 robot operates alongside human workers to handle highly repetitive pick-and-pack tasks without requiring major infrastructure overhauls.

The Stationary Strategy

Rather than building a bipedal robot that walks the warehouse floor, Ultra Robotics has taken a pragmatically narrow approach with its OP1 system, known as "Operator."

Introduced in April, the OP1 is a stationary, dual-arm AI robot designed specifically to automate highly repetitive tasks like packing, sorting, and kitting without requiring major infrastructure changes. The robot is mounted on a fixed base, allowing it to move around a single work cell, grab items off the floor, and reach up to 10 feet high.

A studio shot of the stationary Ultra OP1 robot on a white background, surrounded by an orange circle graphic indicating its 10-foot operational reach radius. — By utilizing a stationary base design, the OP1 sacrifices mobility to ensure continuous 24-hour operation with zero risk of tipping, while still maintaining an extensive 10-foot reach within its work cell.

By sacrificing mobility, Ultra has solved several major pain points that currently bottleneck bipedal deployments. The stationary design allows the robot to plug directly into a wall outlet, enabling continuous 24/7 operation with no downtime for battery charging and zero risk of tipping over. Ultra claims that their robots can adapt to the unpredictable reality of warehouse workflows, handling endless item variations without requiring perfectly structured environments.

This flexibility is driven by the system's underlying software architecture. As previously reported, Ultra leverages Physical Intelligence's π0.6 foundation model as an intelligence layer. This integration enables the robot to process complex, "long tail" packaging tasks and recover from errors autonomously, significantly boosting throughput.

Industry City: A Live-Action Proving Ground

The collaboration between Highline Commerce and Ultra Robotics is heavily facilitated by their shared location in Industry City, a massive 35-acre tech and manufacturing campus in Brooklyn's Sunset Park.

For Ultra Robotics, having a 3PL partner in the same complex means its engineers can test the OP1 on a live production floor rather than a polished corporate laboratory. This tight physical feedback loop allows the team to observe real-time edge cases—such as deformable mailers or oddly shaped products—and iterate quickly. Highline Commerce CEO Richard Hurley noted in the press release that the density of on-site manufacturing, fulfillment, and robotics companies creates an ecosystem that simply couldn't be replicated in Silicon Valley without prohibitive real estate costs.

This localized, real-world testing mirrors a broader industry push toward verifying hardware on active production lines. Just as Figure recently had to prove its hardware durability through a 200-hour livestream marathon, and AGIBOT opted to broadcast directly from a consumer electronics factory floor, Ultra is leaning on live fulfillment data to prove its commercial viability.

Deployment in Hours, Not Months

A key hurdle in industrial automation is the "integration tax"—the months of planning, rewiring, and infrastructure overhauls usually required to install new hardware. Ultra Robotics is attempting to bypass this entirely.

According to the company, the OP1 can be rolled up, plugged in, and operational within hours. In a recent customer deployment, Ultra reported that its team delivered two robots in the afternoon, and both units were autonomously packing mailers before the day ended.

While the exact number of OP1 units currently deployed at Highline Commerce has not been disclosed, the ability to manage nearly a third of the facility's order volume indicates a serious scaling effort. As brands continue to launch at a breakneck pace in the $50 million-a-year e-commerce sector, the race to automate the fulfillment pipeline is becoming less about futuristic walking robots, and more about who can pack a box reliably today.