Robots and Humans Working Together for Amazon

An article about how humans and robots are working together in Amazon’s warehouse.

The shelves move.

In previous generations of its fulfillment center, Amazon’s workers would have roamed these shelves searching for the products needed to fulfill each new order. Now the shelves themselves glide quickly across the floor carried atop robots about the size and shape of footstools. In a carefully choreographed dance, these robots either rearrange the shelves in neatly packed rows, or bring them over to human workers, who stack them with new products or retrieve goods for packaging.

A couple interesting takeaways from the article:

• The robots are built by Kiva Systems, which Amazon purchased a couple years ago. That’s how important automation is to Amazon – they now own the company which makes the robots. This way, the robots that Kiva is creating will no-doubt become more and more adapted to Amazon’s business model.
• The article also mentions Fetch, which we talked about a couple weeks ago with a video of how Fetch follows a human around for the human to put products in it. The difference, apparently, is that Fetch works in a warehouse designed for a human, where Amazon’s robots work in a purpose-built warehouse that was fundamentally built for them.