Hey Everyone,
In 2023 I’ve become increasingly interested in robots and the advent of robotics in mainstream society. Conrad Gray has been helping me with this coverage a lot.
For example, Amazon has grown up to be a huge employer in the United States and some other countries. As of September, 2023 the U.S. e-commerce multinational headquartered in Seattle, Washington, had 1.46 million full- and part-time employees.
So what happens if a major recession hits and the number of robots increases? As robots improve rapidly with better software, things might get really interesting.
Clearly in the later 2020s the number of robots at Amazon becomes significant and especially in the 2030s. As populations begin to age in many countries, we will need more robots to be fit for work in certain repetitive tasks across a wide variety of industries. My thesis is robots at Amazon are a sort of pilot for all of that.
I asked of if he wanted to go into some detail about this topic. Since the rebrand of his Newsletter, I’ve become a paid subscriber something which is relatively rare for me.
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What’s stunning about Amazon is the range of robots that we can now officially say are operational in their business model. Including now a range of humanoid general purpose robots they are in testing.
Amazon already has somewhere over 750,000 robot systems, see Digit above by Agility Robotics.
Related Reading
One of the most important recent robots at Amazon is called Sparrow.
Don’t forget that Amazon acquired iRobot Roomba, so is also into consumer robotics. Amazon has been laying off many employees in the Alexa departement, as they upgrade the device with Generative A.I. technology.
ARTICLE BEGINS HERE
Guest Contribution article by , November, 2023.
Ordering items on Amazon is simple: just click ‘Buy Now,’ and the next day your items are delivered. Behind the scenes, Amazon finds the item you ordered from the warehouse closest to you and sets in motion a complex logistical system that is invisible to the customer, involving not only thousands of people but also a growing number of robots.
In this article, we will explore how a question in one man’s mind led to the creation of an army of robots that transformed retail and logistics, and how that changed the field of robotics.
From Kiva Systems to Amazon Robotics
The story of Amazon Robotics begins outside Amazon.
It was early 2002, and Mick Mountz’s mind was occupied with one question: Is there a way to make warehouse operations faster? From 1999 to 2001, Mountz was working at Webvan, an online grocery shop, one of many online businesses created during the dot-com bubble and one of its many victims when the bubble burst in the early 2000s. As the business process director for logistics, Mountz was acutely aware of one fact – Webvan’s cost of fulfilling orders ran three times as high as what the business plan had estimated.
After coming up with idea after idea, Mountz eventually came to the conclusion that the answer was robots. A lot of robots. He then called up his former roommate from MIT, Peter Wurman, to find out what kind of software would be needed to orchestrate so many robots. Together, they came up with a system which then they tested in a simulation. The results were amazing: their system was better than any real warehouse. On 15 July 2002, Mountz filed U.S. Patent No. 6950722 and later founded Distrobot Systems to make this vision of a fleet of small robots zooming around a warehouse a reality.
With a patent in hand and with a concept proven in a simulation, Mountz now needed someone to build those robots. Through a recommendation from a colleague, Mountz met Raffaello D’Andrea, who at the time was leading Cornell’s RoboCup team and just so happened to take a sabbatical from MIT. D’Andrea, as well as Wurman, officially joined Distrobot in late 2003 and all three of them got to work.
The business was growing. In 2005, Distrobot became Kiva and signed its first customer, Staples, followed by Walgreens in 2007 and Zappos in 2008. In 2008, Kiva employed 80 people and shipped its 1000th robot. In 2009 Kiva was ranked #6 on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies in America, and Gartner named Kiva one of its “Cool Vendors in Supply Chain Management.”
What Kiva was offering was an innovative way of managing a warehouse. In a typical conveyor-based warehouse, a worker can pick 200 to 400 items per hour. Kiva robots can present a new item to a worker every 6 seconds, leading to a base rate of 600 picks per hour. With Kiva, warehouses could be not only more efficient but also require fewer people. To hit 200,000 picks a day, a traditional warehouse would need two 75-person teams working 8-hour shifts. With Kiva, the same work can be done with 25 people a shift. Kiva robotics system was also cheaper and quicker to set up, taking weeks not months to be fully deployed.
And that’s not all – a warehouse full of Kiva can also self-organize and self-optimise. The computer cluster controlling all robots tracks high- and low-selling products and stores them accordingly, storing the most popular products closer to pick-and-pack stations and placing less popular ones at the back of the warehouse.
The innovation and efficiencies Kiva was bringing to warehouse operations caught the attention of Amazon. At that time, Amazon was rapidly expanding and opening new warehouses. Fulfillment costs as a percentage of revenue rose to more than 9 percent in 2011, from just over 8 percent in 2010. Two previous Amazon acquisitions, Zappos.com and Diapers.com, have been using Kiva robots and were proof that this technology works and can improve the efficiency of warehouse operations.
In early 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva for $775 million. Since the acquisition by Amazon, Kiva hasn’t announced any new customers and let existing contracts expire. In 2015, Kiva Systems became Amazon Robotics.
Even though today the acquisition of Kiva might be a bit forgotten, it is probably one of the most important business decisions Amazon have ever made, maybe even at the same level as launching Amazon Web Services (AWS). By the time Amazon fully implemented Kiva robots in 2014, the company had cut the so-called “click to ship” cycle down from the 60 to 75 minutes required to just 15 minutes and saved the company 20% on operating costs. According to PitchBook, the acquisition of Kiva could have saved Amazon up to $2.5 billion by 2018.
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Thousands of robots enter Amazon warehouses
In its relentless quest to improve efficiency, Amazon started mass deployment of Kiva’s warehouse robots (now called “robotic drive units”). In 2014, Amazon had 15,000 drive units. By 2018, that number grew to 100,000, and it doubled in 2019 to 200,000. In 2022, the count reached 520,000. Today, there are 750,000 drive units zooming around in Amazon’s warehouses. There is a good chance that this number will cross one million units by 2024 if it hasn’t already.
Amazon Robotics is constantly iterating and improving its robots. Recently, Amazon announced a new generation of drive units named Titan. These robots can lift up to 2,500 pounds (over 1133 kg), which is twice as much as Hercules, the most broadly deployed robot within Amazon facilities today.
There are also more specialized units, such as Pegasus or Xantus, which can be outfitted with attachments that allow them to carry different kinds of cargo.
The next generation of drive units is already taking shape, with its main innovation being autonomy and the ability to work alongside humans. Proteus, Amazon’s first fully autonomous warehouse robot, can navigate areas where robots were previously restricted. It was designed to safely work alongside humans, capable of detecting a person and then acting accordingly. Additionally, the robot can provide feedback to warehouse employees with built-in lights and expressive eyes.
Meet Amazon’s First Fully Autonomous Mobile Robot | Amazon News [to embed]
All drive units are built by Amazon Robotics at their facility near Boston, in North Reading, Massachusetts, which can produce over 300,000 drive units a year.
Drive units move shelves and products around the warehouse, but they do not package the products into boxes. The next big challenge for Amazon Robotics is object grasping and manipulation. This is where robotic arms come in. Amazon currently operates three such arms: Robin, Cardinal, and Sparrow. Each of these robots is equipped with cameras, enabling them to recognize objects and read labels. For grabbing objects, these robotic arms are equipped with an array of suction cups.
The first of Amazon’s robotics arms was Robin, which entered service in 2021 and now is deployed in over 1,000 warehouses across the world. Robin is designed to grab packages from a pile, read their labels, and then place them into the correct carts. These carts are subsequently picked up by drive units. During the earnings call in April 2023, Amazon revealed that over 1 billion packages (or one-eighth of all the orders delivered to customers worldwide) were handled by Robin.
Robin’s successor, Cardinal, is currently undergoing testing with the aim of deploying the robot in fulfilment centres by 2024
Unlike Robin or Cardinal, which deal with cardboard boxes, Sparrow, Amazon’s newest robotic arm introduced in November 2022, is designed to pick individual products and put them into boxes.
Meet the Sparrow Robotic System
Drive units and robotic arms come together to create Sequoia, a new integrated robotics system designed to containerize Amazon’s inventory into totes. This system brings together mobile robots, gantry systems, robotic arms, and a new ergonomic employee workstation.
Sequoia reimagines how products are stored and managed inside Amazon’s warehouses. The result is a safer environment for warehouse employees, along with up to a 25% reduction in order processing time. Currently, Sequoia is deployed in Amazon’s facility in Houston.
The dream of a drone delivery service
In the early 2010s, commercial drones began to take off and gain more interest. Advancements in technology made drones cheaper and more practical for use. People started experimenting with how drones could be utilized in various industries such as agriculture, real estate, filmmaking, and construction. While some explored using drones for aerial photography, surveying, or monitoring, others were experimenting with them for package delivery.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos, then CEO of Amazon, announced an experimental drone delivery service. The concept was that drones would deliver orders by air, leaving them at the customer’s doorstep before flying off to deliver the next package. Bezos predicted that this vision would become a reality within the next four to five years.
In 2015, Amazon began testing drone delivery in Canada and the US. Amazon’s first drone delivery took place on December 7, 2016, near Cambridge in the United Kingdom. This delivery was part of Amazon’s Prime Air trial. The first delivery included a package containing an Amazon Fire TV stick and a bag of popcorn. It was delivered directly to the garden of a customer who had a special landing pad setup for the drone. The entire delivery process, from order to arrival, took just 13 minutes.
However, the drone delivery service did not take off as planned.
For years, Amazon has been developing delivery drones and promising that Prime Air would soon be available to everyone. The program had some successful test deliveries, but they required controlled environments and could not work on a massive scale. The failure of the programme became publicly visible when Amazon closed Prime Air’s UK operations in 2021 and laid off over 100 employees. The reports that emerged soon after pictured a chaotic environment with high turnover in management and staff, trying to deliver unrealistic expectations. The project was plagued with technical challenges, as well as regulatory hurdles. Navigating the complex web of aviation regulations, different in each country, and gaining the necessary approvals has been a significant challenge.
The original vision of swarms of delivery drones flying over our heads with packages crashed but did not die. Prime Air program is still alive, albeit with scaled-down ambitions. In 2022, Amazon unveiled the new version of their delivery drone, MK30.
The same year, Amazon announced that customers in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas, will be among the first to receive Prime Air drone deliveries in the US. This year, it was announced that customers in the UK, Italy and an additional US city will soon have the option to get their packages delivered by a drone beginning in late 2024.
Consumer and miscellaneous robots
Drive units, robotic arms and drones are not the only robots at Amazon.
With the acquisition of Dispatch in 2017 and its subsequent rebranding to Scout in 2019, Amazon entered the small autonomous delivery robot market. Scout, alongside other similar solutions like Starship Technologies, aims to solve the ‘last mile’ problem, which refers to the final part of the delivery process from the last distribution centre to the customer, using small, usually six-wheeled, fully electric robots. Scout has been tested in various locations, including Snohomish County, Washington; Irvine, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Franklin, Tennessee.
In 2021, Amazon unveiled Astro, a robot for home. It is a mobile robot that can check if everything is okay in the house, check in on family members, or act as a mobile Alexa speaker. The robot also has a drink holder. At launch, the price for Astro was $1,449.99 (or $999.99 for early adopters). Now, Astro costs $1,599. The page to buy the robot is still up, and it seems it is still available for purchase but only if you live in the US, and it is exclusively available by invitation. Just a couple of days ago, Amazon released Astro for Business, pitching it as a security robot for $2,349.99. Astro was not produced by Amazon Robotics.
In 2022, Amazon acquired iRobot, the creators of the iconic Roomba vacuum cleaner robots, for $1.7 billion.
Amazon also owns Zoox, a company working on self-driving cars, which was acquired for $1.2 billion in 2020. Zoox’s autonomous cars are currently being tested on public roads in California and Las Vegas.
The human-robot relationships at Amazon
Speaking to the media after showing Sequoia to the public, Tye Brady, the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, said that he wants robots to “eliminate all the menial, the mundane and the repetitive” tasks inside Amazon’s business. In his opinion, humans are irreplaceable. “We will always need people… I’ve never been around an automated system that works 100% of the time,” he said. He also dismissed the idea of a fully automated warehouse. “There’s not any part of me that thinks that would ever be a reality,” said Brady. “People are so central to the fulfilment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems.”
According to Amazon, the introduction of robots does not lead to job cuts. The jobs taken by robots won’t come back but people who performed them can be retrained to do other jobs, such as maintaining the huge fleet of robots.
Since fully automated warehouses are not going to happen any time soon, Amazon takes two paths when it comes to integrating robots and humans in the same space. The first one is a separation between these two groups. It involves creating spaces occupied only by robots, where humans cannot go, and vice versa. The second approach is to introduce more collaborative environments. Proteus is an example of such a collaborative robot that can safely work alongside humans. That’s the approach that Brady prefers. “Replacing people with machines is just a fallacy,” he told Forbes. “You’ll probably end up out of business if you have this replacement philosophy”. It looks like Brady is correct in his assessment. In 2018, Tesla tried to replace all its workers with robots. It did not go well. Elon Musk even admitted in a tweet that “excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake” and that “humans are underrated.”
Amazon also argues that the introduction of robots increases workplace safety. However, a report from 2019 challenged Amazon’s narrative by showing that the rate of injuries in Amazon’s warehouses with robots is higher than in those without them (which is already higher than within the industry). One of the reasons for this is the increased number of items a worker is expected to handle. When the first drive units arrived, they were able to deliver three times more items to workers, which then resulted in Amazon expecting the workers to be three times faster to keep up with the robots. It seems Amazon took actions to improve workplace safety as the latest data from Amazon shows that recordable incident rates and lost-time incident rates were 15% and 18% lower, respectively, at Amazon Robotics sites than they were at its non-robotics sites in 2022.
It’s also worth reminding that Amazon warehouses are notorious for awful working conditions. Numerous reports have shown how bad Amazon warehouses are and how much Amazon was churning out its workers. It got to the point where in 2022, a leaked internal report revealed that if Amazon continues business as usual, the company will deplete the available labor supply in the US by 2024. More automation and the new generation of collaborative robots can change the working conditions, but it will be for Amazon to decide if the change is positive or negative.
The future of robots at Amazon is more and smarter robots
Currently, Amazon employs around 1.5 million people worldwide. As the number of robots at Amazon approaches one million, the retail giant is getting closer to the point where it has more robots than human workers.
Engineers at Amazon Robotics will continue their efforts to design and build the most useful robots. More automation is one way the retail giant can tackle growing demand and ensure quick order fulfilment. Amazon knows that investments in robotics focused on efficiency will pay off in the future.
Amazon is also looking outside its own labs in search of new solutions to streamline warehouse operations, either through partnerships, investments or acquisitions. Out of five companies included in the $1 billion Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, three of them are robotics companies. One of them, Agility Robotics, made the news recently as their robot, Digit, is the first humanoid robot to be tested in Amazon’s warehouses.
At the moment, Digit is being tested to see if it can improve the efficiency of processing orders in warehouses. But if the humanoid robots improve further, there’s a possibility that your future packages from Amazon will be delivered by one of these robots. Agility Robotics’s partnership with Ford, which was announced four years ago, was testing this capability. However, after releasing initial press releases, there hasn’t been further information about how Digit performed as a delivery robot.
Another company that received an investment as a part of Amazon Industrial Fund is BionicHive which offers Squid – a warehouse robot that not only can navigate around racks full of products but also climb them (provided the racks have special rails installed) to grab a package off the shelf and deliver it to where it is needed.
As Tye Brady, the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, says there are no plans for fully automated warehouses any time soon, the future seems to be not only more robots but also smarter and collaborative robots. Collaborative robots, often referred to as “cobots,” are designed to work alongside human workers in a shared workspace. Amazon Robotics’ Proteus is an example of a cobot but there is also an entirely new, quickly evolving category of collaborative robotic arms being developed. Industrial robotics leaders such as Kuka and ABB as well as newer players such as Universal Robots are offering cobot arms to businesses.
I haven’t found any confirmation that collaborative robotic arms are being used inside Amazon warehouses. However, it is fair to assume they might have been or are currently being tested. One of the benefactors of the Amazon Industrial Fund, Mantis Robotics, is developing cobot arms and, just like Digit, might one day be tested at Amazon facilities.
Impact of Amazon on the robotics industry
Amazon’s relentless and laser-focused push towards efficiency has had an enormous impact on the research and deployment of robots in retail and logistics. As a leader and often a pioneer in deploying massive numbers of robots in warehouses, Amazon has demonstrated the many benefits of advancing towards increased automation.
The acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 marked a significant milestone in the field of robotics. It created an opportunity for other robotics companies specializing in warehouse automation to fill the void left by Kiva. This move also signalled to other retailers to start seriously considering the integration of robots into their operations. Additionally, it indicated to venture capital investors that robotics was a sector worth investing in, thereby further stimulating the robotics industry. The scale at which Amazon utilizes robots is influencing how other companies deploy robotic technology. Once these ideas have proven successful, others tend to follow suit.
Amazon is always at the forefront of innovation and is leading the robotics industry. Amazon continuously invests in developing new robotics technologies, both for its own operational needs and for broader applications. The company has already revolutionised the warehouses with drive units. Now, it is deploying in its facilities robotic arms and integrated robotics systems like Sequoia. With the recent announcement of testing Agility Robotics’ Digit, Amazon is now venturing into the world of humanoid robots, giving the companies building humanoid robots much-needed real-life tests and possibly validating the concept of commercial humanoid robots.
And even though the original vision of massive swarms of delivery drones did not materialise, Amazon’s involvement in drone delivery has also had a positive impact on the field, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in autonomous aerial delivery services. Being the biggest player in the field, Amazon brought media attention to the field and was a catalyst for other players to join, such as Alphabet and their project Wing. The company has also had an impact on drone regulations in many countries, creating space for other drone companies to provide their products and services.
Amazon is supporting robotics through investments and various robotics competitions and challenges, such as the Amazon Robotics Challenge, encouraging innovation and development in the field of robotics. The company’s acquisitions of robotics startups also shape the direction of robotics development.
As a major player in the field, Amazon’s practices and technological choices often set trends and standards in the robotics industry, influencing how other companies approach automation. At the same time, Amazon’s use of robots has sparked discussions about the impact of automation on employment. While robots have increased efficiency and created some new types of jobs, there are also concerns about job displacement in traditional roles.
Amazon is a global leader in robotics, revolutionizing warehouse automation, advancing the drone industry, and now being one of the first companies to test humanoid robots. Always seeking ways to enhance its efficiency through robotics, Amazon’s activities in this area continue to shape the future of robotics and automation in logistics and beyond.
Sources:
Kiva Systems: Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse
Bots by the numbers: Facts and figures about robotics at Amazon
10 years of Amazon robotics: how robots help sort packages, move product, and improve safety
As robots take over warehousing, workers pushed to adapt
Inside look at Amazon’s robot assembly line
Amazon built the retail of today — its robots are building the Amazon of tomorrow
Fears of employee displacement as Amazon brings robots into warehouses
Amazon’s New Robots Are Rolling Out an Automation Revolution
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