The Robot That Packs Your Sports Gear: How Comau Built an AI Warehouse System for Decathlon

Key points

• Comau, a robotics firm based in Turin, Italy, announced on 24 June 2025 that it has designed and validated an automated order-preparation system tested inside Decathlon's e-commerce fulfilment centres.
• The system uses Comau's MyCo cobot, a collaborative robot (a robot designed to work safely alongside people rather than in a fenced-off cage) running on open-source robotics software called ROS 2.
• The project is part of MASTERLY, a European Union initiative pushing factories and warehouses toward flexible, made-to-order production instead of fixed assembly lines.
• Key partners include Decathlon, Genoa-based systems integrator STAM, and the broader MASTERLY technology consortium.
• Comau says the technology will feed directly into its wider warehouse automation product range.

When you order a pair of trainers from Decathlon at midnight, a human being somewhere has to find them, pack them, and stack the box. That job is repetitive, physically hard, and increasingly difficult to staff at scale. Comau thinks a robot can do it better, and it now has real-world evidence to back that claim up.

What did Comau actually build?

The system centres on a cobot called MyCo, paired with an AI-driven software brain. It can pick up items of wildly different shapes and textures, from rigid plastic equipment to soft fabric bags, handle them without crushing or dropping them, and stack them correctly for dispatch. That is genuinely hard: most warehouse robots struggle the moment a product changes shape.

Comau equipped MyCo with a modular gripper (a swappable mechanical hand), a set of sensors, and vision-based object recognition, meaning the robot uses cameras and AI software to identify and locate objects the way a person would with their eyes. A digital twin, a virtual copy of the warehouse that runs in software, lets engineers test changes before touching the real system.

The whole thing, according to Comau, can adapt in real time if the flow of products changes, without a programmer having to rewrite code from scratch.

Why does Decathlon fit this story so well?

Decathlon shifts millions of orders globally. Its product range spans hundreds of sports, so its fulfilment centres handle an enormous variety of items every single shift. That variety is exactly what breaks most automation. By using Decathlon's operations as the test bed, MASTERLY pushed the technology into genuinely difficult conditions rather than a controlled lab.

First reported by The Robot Report, the project also involved Genoa-based STAM as a systems integrator, coordinating the technology pieces so they work as one.

What does it mean for warehouse workers?

Comau frames MyCo as a machine that handles the heaviest, most repetitive lifting, leaving human workers to manage exceptions, quality checks, and tasks requiring judgement. That is the stated goal: reduce physical strain, not headcount by fiat.

Whether that plays out in practice depends on how individual businesses deploy it. Workers in logistics should watch how contracts and job descriptions evolve as this kind of automation spreads.

What happens next?

Comau says the lessons learned inside Decathlon's operation will shape the next generation of MyCo. The company is also growing its intralogistics (warehouse and internal logistics) capabilities through acquisitions, having already bought two specialist firms, Automha and Invent, to broaden what it can offer.

For shoppers, the near-term effect is faster, more consistent fulfilment. For warehouse operators, the question is whether a system that works for Decathlon's product chaos will translate to their shelves.