“Several years ago, Amazon began rethinking how its primary warehouses
operated. The single biggest change was overhauling how Amazon stored and
moved items. In the old system, Amazon stored products in towers of
cubbies that had a fabric front; workers put a hand into the cubby and
fished around for the desired product. In the […]
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#^The Robots Fueling Amazon’s Automation“Several years ago, Amazon began rethinking how its primary warehouses operated. The single biggest change was overhauling how Amazon stored and moved items.
In the old system, Amazon stored products in towers of cubbies that had a fabric front; workers put a hand into the cubby and fished around for the desired product.
In the new system, called Sequoia, those cubbies have been replaced with plastic bins that robotically slide in and out of a frame. Products can move around the warehouse in those bins, and using computer vision, Amazon can look into the bins from overhead to identify items. Then robotic arms move the items with suction cups…
At Amazon’s most advanced warehouse, in Shreveport, La., employees touch products at just a few stages, such as taking them out of shipping boxes and placing them in bins.
After that, the Sparrow robotic arm looks into a bin of items, picks the one it wants and puts it in another bin. The robotic arm called Robin places packed packages on a small robot called Pegasus, which shuttles packages to drop down specific chutes depending on where they will be shipped. Beneath that chute, a beefy, tall robotic arm called Cardinal grabs sealed boxes and stacks them into carts…
A tortoise-looking robot named Proteus slides under those carts and autonomously carries them to shipping docks. When it navigates around workers, its lights form a smile.
There are other smaller advancements. Different machines pack items into boxes and envelopes, depending on the customer order. One blows air to keep the sides of a paper envelope apart so a worker can easily slide in an item. And the first new address labeler in two decades has an arm that moves in different directions to place the labels on 3,000 packages an hour.”
From
New York Times.
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The Robots Fueling Amazon’s Automation appeared first on
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