TRACY, Calif. -- Amazon employee Rejinaldo Rosales used to wander stacks of shelves to pick up merchandise for orders before finally returning to his station to place them in bins and send them to their next stop. But this summer, squat orange robots, called Kiva, began zooming around the shelves instead, picking up goods and carrying them to Rosales at his station. The result? What used to take hours of walking can happen in mere minutes instead. Rosales, 34, who works at an Amazon fulfillment center in this Central Valley city about an hour and a half away from San Francisco, said he likes his new robotic coworkers. While walking the aisles was good cardio, the new system lets him get through more orders since he stands in one place, he said. We dont socialize as much, but its more efficient, Rosales said as the bots zipped around behind him on the eve of Cyber Monday, when Amazon showed off its latest generation of Kiva robots to a group of journalists.The fleet of machines -- installed in 10 of Amazons US warehouses in California, Texas, New Jersey, Washington and Florida -- enable the company to deliver millions of items to customers. Along with many other retailers, the online shopping giant started its Black Friday sales a week early, building up to one of its busiest days of the year -- Cyber Monday. Last year, customers ordered more than 36.8 million items globally, or 426 items per second, according to Amazon. Amazon expects that number to go up this year but wouldnt say by how much. Industry researcher ChannelAdvisor reported that Amazons holiday sales were already up by 24 percent on Black Friday and up 45 percent on Saturday. Amazon isnt alone; online shopping is mainstream. Customers who used to line up at cashiers stands are buying items from their couches instead. Theyre also using apps while in stores and mixing orders between the real world and the virtual one as they seek out the best deals and most convenient deliveries. Companies like Amazon have ridden this wave from $71 billion in sales 10 years ago to $4.5 trillion last year. Forrester expects this years holiday sales to hit $89 billion, an increase of 13 percent from last year. Part of the way Amazon is keeping up are these Kiva robots. Originally made by a company Amazon bought in 2012, the devices have since been integrated with its warehouse technology. There are 15,000 Kiva robots spread across the 10 warehouses in the companys network, which has more than 50 facilities in the US. Robots are essential for meeting that kind of demand, said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Humans just cant work as fast. Take me to your employer As the Kiva robots speed up the pace of Amazons warehouses, they raise a looming question thats being asked across the modern world: how much of what a human does can be done by a machine instead? The automotive manufacturing industry already knows the answer, as do various technology makers. Foxconn, one of the worlds largest electronics manufacturers and a key supplier for Apple, was reported to be replacing workers with robots a couple years ago. And take a ride across San Franciscos famous Golden Gate Bridge and there wont be a toll taker in sight -- the process is entirely automated. The trend doesnt appear to be stopping, and experts say robots will take over half of all human jobs within 10 to 20 years. A Pew Report in August said a vast majority of people it surveyed said they expect robots to permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service and home maintenance. So far, Amazon said it hasnt eliminated any jobs with the introduction of Kiva. In fact, the company says its hired more people in that time. Amazon wouldnt say how many jobs its added after incorporating Kiva, but overall its hired 61,110 employees since 2011, the year before it bought Kiva. Thats roughly doubling its employee base over the past two years, though the company saw a decline in that growth last year. via CNET
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 07:56:03 +0000
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