In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano,” workers displaced by robots find themselves with an abundance of material goods but a lack of jobs. Watching robots like those from Kiva — recently acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars — zip around warehouses fetching products, it’s easy to wonder whether his dark vision of the future is becoming part of ours. The last 50 years have seen dramatic advances in robotic technology and machines have been made suitable for a dramatically increased number of tasks. The path hasn’t been smooth, though, and it hasn’t proceeded in a way anyone expected, but robots are coming of age in one area after another — most recently warehouse automation.

What does a warehouse robot do anyway?

Most robots used in business today are industrial robots. They are typically large, heavy, outfitted with one or more arms, and are capable of very precisely performing a set of steps repeatedly. First developed in 1961 by Unimation (now part of Kawasaki), industrial robots are commonplace for welding, assembly, and even packing. They use machine vision and other types of sensors for accuracy, but their high power requirements and large mass make them hard to move and often unsafe to be around when they’re operating.

By contrast warehouse robots are a logical evolution of the conveyor belt. They are highly mobile and capable of navigating themselves around the complex environment of a distribution facility. Often they have no arms at all, and simply act as glorified, motorized hydraulic jacks, ferrying loads from one place to another. That simplicity belies the amazing economic power that a robotic warehouse system — including the necessary logistics, control systems, and software — can have in streamlining the mundane but vital task of getting goods where they are going.

Inspiration for warehouse robotics

Research into improving warehouse economics isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been about robots. Reducing the time that workers spend retrieving products from shelves for packing has long been a priority. Warehouse management systems (WMSes) have been developed that use barcodes, scanners, and complex logistics software along with material handling systems to minimize costs.

Some large firms, including IKEA, have massive automated material handling systems to retrieve palettes of product as needed from towers of shelves. Others have automated cranes which can move from aisle to aisle grabbing boxes. Even warehouse design has been improved, as we wrote about in our tour of Newegg’s distribution center. Researchers at the University of Arkansas and Auburn, for example, were coming up with an elegantly optimized aisle configuration for warehouse floors at the same time Kiva was beginning to innovate by developing warehouse robots.

After his experience at Webvan — which raised and then lost over $1 billion in investor capital — Kiva founder Mick Mountz realized that there had to be a breakthrough in cost reduction for large scale distribution businesses to get to the next level. He came up with the simple, but very clever, idea of having the shelves come to the packing stations at the warehouse, rather than having workers go and retrieve each product from the shelves.

Unlike simply rearranging aisles, his vision required all-new control systems, shelving, and layouts to deploy, meaning several years of small-scale beta testing before major customers like Staples and Amazon began to roll out the system full scale. Along the way, Kiva and its competitors have had to innovate in navigation, control systems, and warehouse equipment.

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