Will Robots Take Over Ecommerce Warehouses?

Robots have always played a prominent role in movies, television, and children’s toys. They are now navigating a new arena — warehouses — and changing the way businesses handle their fulfillment.

Producers have been using”dumb” robots for repetitive work in product assembly for ages. With advancements in technology, especially in artificial intelligence, the era of the”smart” robot is expanding the range of tasks that robots can perform. Robots are now cooperating with individuals and in some instances working autonomously.

Warehouse Robots: Early Adopters

Amazon was a pioneer in using robots in fulfillment centers. In 2011 Amazon started using 1,300 robots from Kiva Systems, a Boston-based robotics startup. Amazon appreciated the robots, it bought Kiva Systems in 2012. There are now 15,000 Kiva robots spread across 10 of Amazon’s warehouses. Drugstore merchant Walgreens and office product retailer Staples also used Kiva robots in the moment.

Amazon appreciated the robots, it bought Kiva Systems in 2012.

Using a collaborative approach, Kiva’s squat orange spiders pick up shelves of products from the warehouse floor and send them in a human worker who selects items and packs them into individual boxes for transportation. Kiva’s robots avoid running into each other by using sensors. Amazon also employs an algorithm to discover which are the most popular items and situates these goods closest to the pickers.

Kiva enables Amazon warehouse workers to pick things two or three times faster than filling orders and the system, when more broadly implemented, could cause the merchants decreasing satisfaction costs by $450 million to $900 million in North America, according to Janney Capital Markets. Amazon has estimated the average amount of time required to pull a product from a shelf and put it in a box is now 15 minutes per order, down from an hour and a half.

Added Warehouse Robots

When Amazon bought Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), the vast majority of Kiva’s other customers eventually moved to other robotics systems. Fetch Robotics, located in 2014 in the Silicon Valley, saw a chance. The company creates Fetch and Freight, a complete selection and package system. Fetch can select the items from the shelf (up to 13 lbs ), while Freight provides transit throughout the warehouse. They could work in tandem or customers can use just one. The system includes software to support both the robots and integrate with the warehouse environment. Both robots are based upon the open source robot operating system, ROS.

Another robot manufacturer, Singapore-based GreyOrange, focuses on streamlining order handling in the warehouse, specializing in ecommerce logistics. It works mainly with Indian ecommerce merchants like Flipkart, Amazon India, and Jabong. Its Butler robot is meant to assist ecommerce and logistics operations efficiently treat high-mix, high-volume orders by moving around a warehouse and collecting the goods that are being sent.

The company’s other offering, Sorter, is a searchable sorting system that scans and sorts parcels for transportation. The system has eight components, including dimensioning and weighing, sorting conveyor and arm, and a bagging unit.

Hitachi has developed a two-armed robot that it says can pick up things from shelves in under half the time required by existing robots. The camera on its arm can locate the requested item while the machine is still moving, which lets it function more quickly. It has to be commercially available in 2020.

Complete Warehouse Automation

Amazon’s next foray is robots, such as Fetch, that may grasp items with the intent of eliminating human pickers. In a new novel, Machines of Loving Grace, New York Times reporter John Markoff writes that Amazon’s Kiva robots are”clearly an interim solution toward the ultimate goal of constructing entirely automated warehouses.”

Complete automation of the pick-and-pack process could correct a public relations problem for Amazon, which constructed a few of its own warehouses without air. During summer, temperatures allegedly remain at over 100 degrees daily. Not until this received adverse publicity from a Pennsylvania newspaper did Amazon start retrofitting warehouses with air conditioning.

However, another issue may come up. When Amazon negotiated agreements with several nations to postpone the collection of sales tax in exchange for locating warehouses and providing jobs, nobody considered total warehouse automation. It will be interesting to see how nations respond.

The price of robots is decreasing rapidly and robots that can act autonomously without human intervention are helping in areas like medicine, search and rescue, and agriculture. Many drones can fly autonomously and Amazon has stated its intent to use them for parcel delivery.

Robot Benefits

Robots don’t need health insurance, lunch breaks, or holidays. They could work 24/7 and don’t call in sick. They don’t require training. This is quite helpful during the holiday season when ecommerce merchants typically hire more warehouse employees. Robots can reduce logistics costs substantially with minimal human intervention.

Robots don’t need health insurance, lunch breaks, or holidays. They could work 24/7 and don’t call in sick. They don’t require training.

Ecommerce companies are under pressure to reduce fulfillment costs and send orders to customers more quickly. Any merchant that ships in considerable volume and want to stay competitive will likely have to use robots. Third-party logistics providers are also converting to automation. The courier firm DTDC in India, by means of example, utilizes a 25-arm robot to choose orders at a rate of 3,500 orders per hour, about one per second.

The normal cost of a Fetch warehouse robot is $35,000 and that price is guaranteed to return as more are sold. In five years a robot will be less expensive than a human employee with benefits, especially if the effort to implement a $15 minimum wage succeeds. Over the next five decades, robots will most likely replace humans which are performing simple, repetitive tasks in many industries.