IN Brief:
- LaFayette Systems acquired Attabotics in September 2025 and is restarting operations.
- Attabotics’ cube storage uses a patented structure and robots to reduce warehouse footprint.
- The refreshed organisation blends legacy Attabotics leaders with material handling industry veterans.
Attabotics is restarting operations under LaFayette Systems, following an acquisition completed in September 2025. The relaunch places Attabotics’ goods-to-person cube storage and retrieval technology inside a broader material handling group with established controls, software, integration, and service capabilities across the US.
Attabotics is best known for its high-density “cubic” storage concept — a departure from aisle-based fulfilment layouts that trade long travel distances for vertical and horizontal access within a grid-like structure. The system is designed to provide direct access to storage locations using robotic shuttles, aiming to reduce the footprint needed for a given level of inventory and throughput, particularly where land costs, building constraints, or proximity-to-customer requirements push operators toward denser designs.
LaFayette Systems’ positioning is that the combination tightens execution discipline around a technically ambitious platform. Founder Bruce Robbins described the goal as to “pair the exceptional technology from Attabotics with LaFayette’s warehouse automation expertise,” framing the relaunch as a commercialisation and support play as much as a product story.
The Calgary facility remains central to the plan, continuing to house engineering, business, and manufacturing functions. The leadership roster is structured to retain institutional knowledge while adding external material handling experience. Mark Dickinson, John Hickman, and Derek Fortier remain with the organisation, with Dickinson leading strategy and operations, Hickman overseeing manufacturing, and Fortier responsible for supply chain management. Sales and software leadership sits with Art Eldred, who brings decades of experience across major material handling businesses.
Dickinson’s focus is explicitly on execution quality, saying, “We’re focused on accelerating development, improving reliability, and listening to what matters to customers,” an emphasis that aligns with how fulfilment buyers typically evaluate dense automation: not on concept videos, but on uptime, service response, and how quickly the system can be modified when order profiles change.
For LaFayette, the addition is also about portfolio fit. The group already spans conveyor and sortation software and controls, industrial robotics and machine vision, regional integration coverage, and component fabrication. Cube storage can sit above or alongside those assets, providing a differentiated storage layer that feeds sortation, packing, and dispatch.
The restart also arrives at a useful time in the buying cycle. Many operators are re-evaluating automation architectures to cope with higher SKU counts, tighter delivery promises, and labour constraints that fluctuate by region and season. Dense goods-to-person systems are not a universal answer — they require careful slotting discipline, robust exception handling, and strong service coverage — but they remain attractive for facilities where space is the hardest constraint.
Attabotics is scheduled to appear at MODEX in Atlanta on 13–16 April 2026, putting the relaunch in front of integrators, 3PLs, and retail operations teams that are actively re-scoping their next wave of fulfilment investments.
