Fall 2016
The Social Contract
Amazon Robotics
A case study of how smart machines transformed an Internet store
By Brenda Walker
B
ack in the early years of the Internet, it seemed The robots greatly increase the company’s ability
like financial experts chattered on interminably to sell and ship massive amounts of stuff. For example,
about Amazon’s business strategy, and partic- during the special sale on its July 12, 2016, Amazon
ularly when or if the company would ever make a profit. Prime Day, the company sold more than 600 items per
But more recently, the founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was second, including 90,000 TVs and two million toys.
ranked in July 2016 by Forbes as the third-richest person The robots also increase the company’s bottom
in the world, worth $65.3 billion. So his plan of playing line by reducing costs. Senior Vice President Dave Clark
the long game of building the company infrastructure estimated last year that the Kiva robot system reduced
has paid off very well for him. operating expenses by about 20 percent, so there’s seri-
A big part of Amazon’s ability to go big in vol- ous savings happening from the robots. A report from
ume and increased delivery speed has been its imple- early 2016 says that the company has 30,000 robots in
mentation of warehouse automation, starting when it 13 distribution centers in the U.S.
purchased the Kiva robot company in 2012 for $775 CEO Bezos seems to be a dedicated tech nerd, as
million. Before that, workers pushed carts around the suggested by his December 2013 appearance on CBS’s
warehouse, walking miles daily as they picked out items Sixty Minutes show, which did a glowing gee-whiz seg-
for orders. In fact, a 2011 article in the Morning Call ment on the company. VP Dave Clark showed off the
of Lehigh, Pennsylvania, recounted employee prob- sorting and storage techniques in the Raleigh distribu-
lems with heat exhaustion as temperatures soared to tion center, which interestingly did not yet have Kivas
100 degrees and above in the summer. One worker in and still used humans to collect customer selections
that warehouse reported walking 13 to 15 miles daily, using carts:
which isn’t surprising given the size of buildings needed REPORTER CHARLIE ROSE: Once your
to hold the massive inventory. Another “fulfillment cen- order is placed, a so-called “pick ambassador”
ter” (as Amazon calls its warehouse-distribution hubs) walks the aisles, plucking and scanning your
in Robbinsville, New Jersey, covers 1.2 million square items before placing them in bins. Those
feet, or around 27 acres. bins eventually wind up in front of a packer,
But all that unpleasantness is fading into the past who knows exactly how big of a box to use
now that Kiva has entered the scene. The Kiva’s little based on the weight and amount of items,
robots that look like squat orange ottomans on wheels your address is slapped onto the box and
are hooked up to a main computer system that tracks and then a picture is taken of your address label,
moves everything in the warehouse. The robots scoot gadgets known as “shoes” sort and divert
under mobile racks of stored merchandise and transport the boxes to the appropriate spiral chute,
needed items to stations run by humans who package up based on the postal code. This accelerates the
the purchases for shipment to customers. delivery process. The boxes are then loaded
onto awaiting trucks, which are assigned to
particular regions — Raleigh, North Carolina,
in this case. Amazon uses more trucks than
Brenda Walker is publisher of the websites planes because so many distribution centers
LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost. have been built near customers.
org. A resident of the San Francisco Bay area, she is a After enthusing about the advances of technol-
frequent contributor to The Social Contract. ogy in Amazon’s warehouse system, Bezos pulled out
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Fall 2016 The Social Contract
a surprise for viewers — a drone delivery vehicle. With boxes — that’s the “picking” part. It’s a big challenge
such machines, he said the company could do “half hour for a robot, but success will be sweet for the eventual
delivery, and we can carry objects, we think, up to five winner, remembering that Amazon purchased the Kiva
pounds, which covers 86 percent of the items that we system for $775 million.
deliver... These generations of vehicles, it could be a On the down side, when a robot can pick and pack
10-mile radius from a fulfillment center. So, in urban just as well as a human, quite a number of workers will
areas, you could actually cover very significant portions lose their jobs. Some Amazon centers have increased
of the population.” hiring this year because of good sales, but the long-
A sky full of buzzing delivery drones may not term prospects are dreary for human workers in that
be the future Americans envision for their cities, but company. Why don’t brilliant captains of industry
billionaire Bezos would like to build it. He remarked in like Bezos recognize that a healthy economy requires
2015 that delivery drones will someday be “as common shoppers with money in their pockets? — aka workers,
as seeing a mail truck.” for the most part. Most of us aren’t heiresses like Paris
Hilton.
The Picking Challenge has added to the general
interest and activity now in robotics to perform similar
tasks. However, another factor has inspired more
research, namely Bezos’ tactic of holding on tight to his
Kiva acquisition — now officially known as Amazon
Robotics. Normally the purchaser of a unique company
like Kiva would take over its existing accounts and
continue to market the service to others. But Bezos
chose to end the exterior business and move to keep
the technology entirely within the Amazon house. The
result of that strategy has been a prod for other engineers
to invent different machines to do similar functions
without violating the existing Kiva patents, a process
that has taken a while but is beginning to show results.
Amazon warehouse Kiva robots fetch merchandise to deliver The Hitachi company in Japan has produced a
to employees who pack customers’ orders. According to the robot that can move around the floor, grasp an object
Robot Report, “Over 15,000 bright orange Kiva robots are on a shelf, and place it in a box for shipment. There are
operating across the U.S.” also start-ups in Silicon Valley and beyond looking to
fill the warehouse-distribution niche left open by the exit
One little-discussed aspect of drones is the safety of Kiva. One Valley hopeful is Fetch Robotics, which is
hazard of robotic flying machines running into peo- working on a mobile picking bot that can place items
ple, events which are not that uncommon. Bard Col- in a separate freight robot that then moves to a pack-
lege runs the Center for the Study of the Drone, with ing station. Grey-Orange, a new India company based in
an accompanying website (dronecenter.bard.edu) that Singapore, has constructed an apparent Kiva knock-off
posts tech, regulatory, and safety news. A few per- that is more square in appearance but performs the same
sonal injury lawyers now advertise expertise in harm- functions.
ful drone-to-human encounters. The March 2015 issue For another warehouse chore, Wal-Mart announced
of Scientific American had a list of injuries in a piece in June 2016 that it was six to nine months from using
titled “5 Epic Drone Flying Failures.” A Google search drones to do inventory, cutting the time of that task from
for Drone Accident brings an assortment of unpleasant one month to one day. So interior robots aren’t even
horror stories. Spinning blades and the human body are limited to the floor.
not a good fit. The upshot is that more diverse robots will be per-
Jeff Bezos also envisions an even more automated, forming jobs formerly done by human workers in the
less human warehouse environment. One side project is warehouse and distribution environment. Most other
the Amazon Picking Challenge, which has twice invited industries have some form of automation, computer-
robot inventors to participate in a contest to replicate the ization, robots, or other modern mechanization that
killer app of human intelligence plus hand dexterity. In will lessen the need for workers over time. Amazon is
2015 the first such event welcomed 28 teams of robotic a leader in the field, which develops technical strate-
specialists with their machines to compete in recogniz- gies that signal trends that other companies watch and
ing specific objects and packing them efficiently into possibly follow. ■
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