Otto Group and Sereact have announced a phased robotic returns-processing project at an Otto logistics centre in Poland. The first phase calls for ten dual-arm systems, with a second phase planned to take the programme toward a total of 25 robots based on operating results. The partners will jointly develop the application before assessing a wider rollout.
Sereact’s Cortex model will control grasping, item identification, condition assessment and sorting. Returned goods arrive in changing packaging, orientations and physical conditions, requiring the system to handle unfamiliar objects. Under the service model, Sereact will operate and maintain the equipment while employees oversee exceptions and quality decisions.
The project follows Sereact’s 21 October returns-training programme with Zalando, CEVA Logistics, Nebius and NVIDIA. That workflow begins with recorded picking episodes from physical returns stations. Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab create simulated variations, while Cosmos world models vary clothing state, packaging, materials and lighting. Updated policies are trained on Blackwell GPUs and evaluated against held-out cases before testing at the stations.
CEVA operates the returns stations for Zalando, providing a production setting in which newly trained policies can be tested on customer goods. The pipeline uses those results to generate targeted examples for failures and repeat training and evaluation. The Otto project brings Sereact’s returns-handling technology to another European retailer as the companies test its suitability for broader logistics use.
