The Robotic Inventory Revolution
Next time you order a book from Amazon, or shoes from Zappos, consider that you items were probably handled at one point by a robot. Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you.
The leader in warehouse robotics is Kiva Systems, but now a new competitor, Symbotic is ready to enter the market. How is Symbotic different from Kiva Systems, the better-known warehouse robotics company? Kiva's short, squat bots typically move big racks of open boxes to an order-picker who removes individual items and then packs them into a box that'll be sent to a customer. One example would be filling a box with three different pairs of shoes for a Zappos.com order. Symbotic, on the other hand, builds short, squat bots that grab closed boxes of merchandise and bring them to another robot (made by a third-party vendor) that puts them onto wooden pallets, at which point they're loaded onto a truck and sent to a retail store. Kiva's bots help to fill boxes full of items, and Symbotics' bots build pallets stacked with boxes.
Kiva robots were dreamed up and executed by old MIT buddies, these teams of retail robots presage an automated future in which multiagent robotic systems put computer science theories into practice.
"The basic technology will be the de facto way to run a warehouse," said Pete Wurman, computer science Ph.D. and a technical lead on the team that developed the robot. "We’ll start to see these same techniques that become the de facto techniques in manufacturing."
While the humanoid robotic visions of the 1950s have never come to Jetsons-like fruition, less sexy robots have become indispensable parts of many industries and service professions. A recent report by the International Federation of Robotics found that 6.5 million robots serve humanity around the world. Still, most of them are standalone or primarily operated by human beings. Kiva robots are different: They’re both autonomous and networked.
What that means for workers in the warehouse is that the Henry Ford-era distribution system of the conveyor belt has been broken into pieces and distributed across the entire operation. Any worker (sometimes called "pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out.
The success of Kiva Systems could help teams of autonomous robots gain ground outside the computer science lab.
"I could see some of the techniques that we are developing being applied outside the warehouse," Wurman said. "When we have autonomous automobiles, you could imagine they’ll have similar types of coordination problems."
Unlike the Honda ASIMO, Kiva robots don’t look anything like a human or try to perceive the world through human-like senses. They don’t use sophisticated visual sensors to navigate; instead, they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that’s stuck onto the floor of the warehouse.
That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working around the people, cruising around in the dark.
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The leader in warehouse robotics is Kiva Systems, but now a new competitor, Symbotic is ready to enter the market. How is Symbotic different from Kiva Systems, the better-known warehouse robotics company? Kiva's short, squat bots typically move big racks of open boxes to an order-picker who removes individual items and then packs them into a box that'll be sent to a customer. One example would be filling a box with three different pairs of shoes for a Zappos.com order. Symbotic, on the other hand, builds short, squat bots that grab closed boxes of merchandise and bring them to another robot (made by a third-party vendor) that puts them onto wooden pallets, at which point they're loaded onto a truck and sent to a retail store. Kiva's bots help to fill boxes full of items, and Symbotics' bots build pallets stacked with boxes.
Kiva robots were dreamed up and executed by old MIT buddies, these teams of retail robots presage an automated future in which multiagent robotic systems put computer science theories into practice.
"The basic technology will be the de facto way to run a warehouse," said Pete Wurman, computer science Ph.D. and a technical lead on the team that developed the robot. "We’ll start to see these same techniques that become the de facto techniques in manufacturing."While the humanoid robotic visions of the 1950s have never come to Jetsons-like fruition, less sexy robots have become indispensable parts of many industries and service professions. A recent report by the International Federation of Robotics found that 6.5 million robots serve humanity around the world. Still, most of them are standalone or primarily operated by human beings. Kiva robots are different: They’re both autonomous and networked.
What that means for workers in the warehouse is that the Henry Ford-era distribution system of the conveyor belt has been broken into pieces and distributed across the entire operation. Any worker (sometimes called "pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out.
The success of Kiva Systems could help teams of autonomous robots gain ground outside the computer science lab.
"I could see some of the techniques that we are developing being applied outside the warehouse," Wurman said. "When we have autonomous automobiles, you could imagine they’ll have similar types of coordination problems."
Unlike the Honda ASIMO, Kiva robots don’t look anything like a human or try to perceive the world through human-like senses. They don’t use sophisticated visual sensors to navigate; instead, they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that’s stuck onto the floor of the warehouse.
That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working around the people, cruising around in the dark.
In the embedded video below, Mick Mountz explains the Kiva Systems robotic warehouse.
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