Amazon debuts robotic warehouse
Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, told the Globe in an interview. Looking like a proud papa, Brady, who is based in Massachusetts, gave a Globe reporter a tour of the facility the day before the ribbon cutting. “It just showed up like a big baby bouncing boy,” Brady said with enthusiasm.
All of the North Andover robots are designed in-house and manufactured at one of two Amazon factories in Massachusetts. In fact, all of the 750,000 robots Amazon has deployed worldwide were built in Massachusetts, Brady said. (Amazon Robotics grew out of Amazon’s acquisition of North Readingbased Kiva Systems in 2012.)
“It’s applied robotics,” he said. “They’re not doing back flips or dances out there on the floor — I love those, I get it — but they’re doing the job of moving goods on time and very reliably.”
The entire warehouse is designed to handle items that are no larger than 18-1/2 inches on a side — just right to fit in the common yellow plastic totes that are the blood vessels of the 21st-century logistics industry. The new warehouse is more than twice the size of Amazon’s Fall River facility that handles larger goods.
Brady explained that the facility employs three distinct types of robots, which are intended to take over menial, monotonous, and repetitive jobs.
On the first floor, workers unload cases of goods from trucks and unpack all of the items into yellow totes. The totes are then sent to one of the top four floors where items are stored.
On each storage floor, a vast central space is fenced off as the domain of Amazon’s Hercules robots — round, flat machines on wheels that zip under tall shelving pods filled with stored items. The robots move the shelving pods where they are needed. Each pod has four sides of shelves and each side has 30 or more cubbies holding different items.
Around the edges of the floor, workers at high-tech stations receive totes filled with items needing to be stored. As they lift goods from the tote, an optical scanner identifies each item. A Hercules robot brings a shelving pod to the worker’s station. The worker can place the item in any cubby on the pod that looks like it has enough room, while a Lidar sensor tracks exactly where the item ended up. Like an unimaginably complicated jigsaw puzzle, millions of items are distributed at random across thousands of shelving pods.
But the system knows where every item is. Between the time when a customer selects items on Amazon’s website and clicks to order the items for delivery, the company’s systems locate the items and calculate two ways to deliver them to the customer’s front door for redundancy, Brady said.
At other stations around the edges, workers conduct the process of fulfilling customer orders. Empty totes are filled with orders and returned to the first floor, where orders are packaged and shipped.
Once ready for shipping, the system of getting each package to the correct truck relies on two other Amazon robots. As packages flow along a conveyor belt, an automated arm dubbed Robin lifts up and scans packages one at a time and sets them down on a mobile robot called Pegasus. Each wheeled Pegasus robot then carries the package to a conveyor that will bring the package to the correct truck bay.
Amazon says the increased use of robotics improves safety and cuts down on worker injuries.
Gordon Burtch, a Boston University professor who studies workplace automation, said studies have confirmed that Amazon’s robots reduce the number of severe injuries in the company’s facilities. But, he said, his research also has found an increase in less severe injuries from repetitive tasks.
“They are making the work safer for warehouse associates,” Burtch said. But, the warehouse workers among robots “are not only required to work more quickly, they also end up standing in one spot, performing the same monotonous task over and over. This combination of speed and repetition leads to more stress-based injuries among workers.”
The site of the North Andover warehouse was an AT&T telephone factory for decades, employing as many as 12,000 workers at its peak in the 1980s. After the breakup of the Bell system, the factory was owned by Lucent Technologies and made networking gear until it closed in 2008.