Hundreds of robots coordinating in a warehouse
IEEE Spectrum published Kiva Systems' deployment figures: 500 robots at a 30,000-square-metre Staples fulfilment centre, hundreds at a Walgreens distribution centre, and 600 picks an hour against 200 to 400 on a conveyor.
Why it matters
Autonomous machines were working not one at a time but as fleets of several hundred that have to be routed without collisions and kept fed with work. What was solved here is not the dexterity of one machine but the coordination of many, and that is the form in which robotics reached industrial scale a decade and a half before the humanoid wave.
Staples moved all item-by-item picking at its Chambersburg, Pennsylvania site to Kiva, installing 500 robots across 30,000 square metres, and built a new Denver warehouse around the system. Walgreens ran hundreds of robots at a distribution centre in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and Zappos was adding them to its Shepherdsville, Kentucky centre, which then held 4.2 million shoes, handbags and clothing items. On throughput: in a conveyor-based operation a worker picks 200 to 400 items an hour; Kiva robots present a new item every 6 seconds, a base rate of 600 picks an hour, with Walgreens reaching more than 700. A warehouse performing 200,000 picks a day would need two 75-person shifts with conveyors; with Kiva, 25 people a shift suffice. A system for a 10,000-square-metre facility cost between 4 and 6 million dollars. In April 2008 Kiva shipped its 1000th robot. The company was founded in 2003 by Mick Mountz with Peter Wurman and Raffaello D'Andrea; the robots navigated by barcode stickers on the floor and carried collision-prevention sensors.