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