en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Yandex Robotics team has deployed a robot named "Robotic Arm" at the Yandex.Lavka factory in St. Petersburg. This robotic arm is responsible for transferring sealed trays from the conveyor belt to transport boxes, preparing meals for shipment. Compared to manual operations, the robotic arm completes this task 30% faster, thereby freeing human employees from monotonous repetitive work and allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.

The robotic arm is part of a composite system called a "robotic workstation." In addition to the robot itself, this workstation includes a conveyor belt and a diverter. The conveyor belt moves trays within the workshop, while the diverter splits the tray flow into sections to form a single layer according to the dimensions of different transport boxes.

The robotic arm is equipped with a special vacuum gripper that can pick up an entire layer of trays at once, rather than transferring them one by one as humans do. The design of the gripper allows it to handle trays of varying weights and shapes. Additionally, the robot is resistant to low temperatures, as the workshop where it operates is maintained at around 4°C.

This solution was developed and implemented by the Yandex Robotics team. Last year, the team robotized another Lavka facility in Moscow—a dark store. In that dark store, autonomous mobile robots transport shelves containing required goods to pickers, increasing order picking speed by an average of one-third.

Robotization enables factory employees to reduce resource investment in routine operations and focus on complex tasks such as quality control, internal logistics management, and technical maintenance. The St. Petersburg factory produces finished meals under the "Из Лавки" brand, with a daily output of 85,000 portions, totaling 24 tons in weight. Finished meals are one of the most popular categories on the Yandex.Lavka platform, with their total gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing by 37% year-on-year in 2025.