Amazon Robots Get Ready for Christmas

[alansplace]

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Amazon Robots Get Ready for Christmas
20 November 2014
From The Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc. ‘s robot army is finally falling into place.

The Seattle online retailer has outfitted several U.S. warehouses with squat, orange, wheeled robots that move stocked shelves to workers, instead of having employees seek items amid long aisles of merchandise, according to people familiar with the matter.

At a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in Tracy, Calif., about 60 miles east of San Francisco, Amazon this summer replaced four floors of fixed shelving with the robots, the people said.

Now, “pickers” at the facility stand in one place and wait for robots to bring four-foot-by-six-foot shelving units to them, sparing them what amounted to as much as 20 miles a day of walking through the warehouse. Employees at some robot-equipped warehouses are expected to pick and scan at least 300 items an hour, compared with 100 under the old system, current and former workers said.

[Apache]

And probably put on a lot of extra weight which will increase their health care costs.
Apache

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Apache

And probably put on a lot of extra weight which will increase their health care costs.
Apache

They'll become world class table tennis players, though.

[QuantumIguana]

I was listening to someone who used to work as a picker for Amazon. She was given a tablet and told what section to go to, and you had a countdown. If the item wasn't where the tablet said it would be, you had to scan every item in the bin and verify it wasn't there. That still counted against your time. That hardly seems fair, if you tell an employee to get an item from a certain bin and it isn't there, it's not the employee's fault. It would make sense to credit them back the time.

If I had to work as a picker for Amazon, I think I would rather walk. It's good exercise, and I would find picking 300 items per hour - an item every 12 seconds! - would get mind-numbing. I suspect that it won't be long before the human pickers are replaced entirely, with robots picking the items from the bins.

[rollei]

Amazon going high tech.. may not be good news for the people they are replacing.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by rollei

Amazon going high tech.. may not be good news for the people they are replacing.

That would be the "poor, abused and underpaid" warehouse workers?
Don't you see? They are liberating them!

Amazon is turning a new leaf and freeing their wage slaves from the drudgery of manual labor so they can find nice high-paying air conditioned union jobs.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

That would be the "poor, abused and underpaid" warehouse workers?
Don't you see? They are liberating them!

Amazon is turning a new leaf and freeing their wage slaves from the drudgery of manual labor so they can find nice high-paying air conditioned union jobs.

Once Amazon got rid of all the manual labor pickers they can go union and replace everybody with one warehouse manager and a few people in maintenance to keep the robots running. Win win - no more cheap labor ...

[tubemonkey]

Cool technology. Amazon needs to slap its logo on these critters.

[murg]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

and I would find picking 300 items per hour - an item every 12 seconds! - would get mind-numbing.

There are many, many jobs that are mind-numbing.

[Katsunami]

When having to pick 5 orders a minute, I'd rather work at the docks, as a machine operator, or a constructor. At that picking rate, killing myself would look very attractive... I admit, I'd never be able to keep that up.

[Anthem]

This sounds awesome. I would love to see this in real life.

[murg]

http://www.amazon.jobs/

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Anthem

This sounds awesome. I would love to see this in real life.

You can:

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/yes-can...ouse-facility/

[theducks]

Apple had an Automated MAC Warehouse
in 1984

(
The big difference, no tracks, or rails with the new Robots

[fjtorres]

They have a whole lot of them: 15,000 spread across 10 of their busiest warehouses.
They cut over an hour of processing time on a single order.

CNET has the numbers, details, and how they name the robots.
(A bit creepy, methinks.)
http://www.cnet.com/news/meet-amazon...he-kiva-robot/

There are 15,000 Kiva robots spread across the 10 warehouses in the company's network, which has more than 50 facilities in the US.

"Robots are essential for meeting that kind of demand," said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Humans just can't work as fast.

So far, Amazon said it hasn't eliminated any jobs with the introduction of Kiva. In fact, the company says it's hired more people in that time. Amazon wouldn't say how many jobs it's added after incorporating Kiva, but overall it's hired 61,110 employees since 2011, the year before it bought Kiva. That's roughly doubling its employee base over the past two years, though the company saw a decline in that growth last year.

The way Kiva robots work in Amazon's warehouses may seem limited, but the company says the work they do shaves more than an hour off an average order. At Amazon's fulfillment center in Tracy, people could be seen alongside various machines.

A product begins its life in an Amazon warehouse as employees unload packages from a truck onto a conveyer belt. A line of about 25 people stand near one conveyor belt, unloading boxes and cutting them open.

Employees then unpack the boxes and place them in carts that are brought to other workers who sort the items into the shelves.

The items appear to be shelved randomly, but they're actually organized based upon a computer algorithm. The result: one shelf in the Tracy warehouse had a My Little Pony toy, a roll of fluorescent tape and copies of Hamlet, smushed up next to one another.

Tracy's 3,000 Kiva robots pick up shelves of products from the warehouse floor and bring them to a human employee who picks items and then packs them for shipping. This saves Amazon time and presumably money as well, though the company declined to say how much. Amazon's Clark said the average amount of time it takes to grab an item from a shelf and stuff it in a box is now about 15 minutes per order, down from an hour and a half. Amazon has steadily improved the robots since Kiva's acquisition, as well. The latest Kiva robot can move 50 percent more inventory out of the center than its predecessor could.

As for why the massive investment in robots, buying the company and all the added R&D:

Along with many other retailers, the online shopping giant started its Black Friday sales a week early, building up to one of its busiest days of the year -- Cyber Monday. Last year, customers ordered more than 36.8 million items globally, or 426 items per second, according to Amazon.

Amazon expects that number to go up this year but wouldn't say by how much. Industry researcher ChannelAdvisor reported that Amazon's holiday sales were already up by 24 percent on Black Friday and up 45 percent on Saturday.

That 24% growth number has been popping up in their financials quarter after quarter. It compounds pretty fast. They're going to need a whole lot more robots.

Lots of pics at the source.