Economy of motion in robots assembly lines, microelectronics, medical and space applications has not received much attention. It is however, as challenging and important as efficiency and ergonomics is to human beings in the factory workplace. Production lines with humans are prone to human fatigue. Hence robotic units are replacing human sorters for production line work. Mechanised operations are usually limited to batch processes with identical items taken from a conveyor belt and placed in a bin or stack. A further extension is to use AI programs to enable discrimination of objects and sorting into separate bins or stacks. In the present study a 5 d.o.f. arm kit was assembled by students and used to understand simple robotic concepts like degree of freedom, gripper action, pick and place, palletisation and other topics in a lab syllabus together with online simulators where factory robots are simulated. Basic algorithms are explored by testing with the 5 dof Puma arm. The addition of tactile and visual interfaces for pick and sort are discussed. Sample outputs are illustrated.