- December 3, 2014
- 6:09 pm
- John Caltagirone
- no comments
Amazon’s Use of Robots in Supply Chain, Not Far from the Larger Trend
With the busy holiday season quickly approaching, Amazon, Inc. is preparing itself by stocking its facilities with orange robots. Coined “pickers,” these machines will now assist Amazon workers by bringing them stocked shelving units in the 1.2 million-square-foot facility warehouse.
Due to the volume of Amazon warehouses, estimated about 20 miles a day of walking for employees, these robots will surely save workers some time and energy to ensure the accuracy of the packages being sent out to customers. In fact, they allow employees to process 200 more items per hour in comparison to 100 items previously.
The robots were adopted through a $755 million buy out of Kiva Systems Inc. by Amazon in 2012. Shortly after, Amazon began implementing them into their shipping operations and now functioning in facilities in Kentucky, Texas, and California.
This is not far from normal, especially with a growing trend of the use of machines and robots to assemble and aid in supply chain production and processes. Recently I uncovered Baxter, a robot that is redefining the use of machines in manufacturing.
Making its debut in 2012 with Rethink Robotics, Baxter (powered by Intera) has a quite impressive resume of skills. It is a interactive production robot trained to be useful for processes from line loading and machine tending to packaging and material handling. It has said to put many companies at a competitive advantage in the industry, but of course this comes with a price tag, $25,000 a piece.
In any sense, it will be interesting to see how the industry will move to incorporate more robot type machines into their production lines and how it will affect efficiency and cost.
For more information on Baxter, visit http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/
-Riti Patel, Assistant, Supply and Value Chain Center
Source: http://www.supplychain247.com/article/amazon_robots_get_ready_for_christmas