In fact, for many of them the idea of handing over their inventories to robots is a big departure, if not a crazy proposition. It’s the assembly-line approach that most warehouse managers are used to, and it hasn’t changed much in the past 100 years. Human operators stand along the conveyors, near inventory shelves, grabbing products and putting them into boxes or totes rolling past them. Today’s most automated distribution centers rely on vast mazes of conveyor belts, chutes, and carousels. “They’re a well-oiled machine,” says one engineer at the company.Īfter four years perfecting its system, Kiva now faces the challenge of convincing potential customers to switch from conventional warehouse technologies to a fleet of mobile robots. D’Andrea and Wurman, who are called engineering fellows, oversee system architecture and algorithm development Mountz, the CEO, drives the business. Raff, Mick, and Pete, as they’re known, form a triumvirate of sorts. Step Up: Kiva’s founders (from left), Peter Wurman, Mick Mountz, and Raffaello D’Andrea, envision thousands of robots in warehouses. The third founder is Peter Wurman, an expert in multiagent systems and a former professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh. An engineering professor formerly at Cornell University and now at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, he joined Kiva after meeting Mick Mountz, a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School, who conceived the idea of using mobile robots to manage inventory. “But of course they never do.”ĭ’Andrea should know. “When you see these things moving, you think, ‘Oh my goodness, they’re going to hit,’ ” D’Andrea says. A computer cluster keeps track of all robots and racks on the floor, and resource-allocation algorithms efficiently orchestrate their movement. Kiva’s idea is simple: by making inventory items come to the warehouse workers rather than vice versa, you can fulfill orders faster. This is the demonstration facility of Kiva Systems, a start-up in Woburn, Mass., just north of Boston, that wants to reinvent the centuries-old warehouse business. They move along straight lines and make 90-degree turns, maneuvering just 15 centimeters from each other. One robot hauls shelves with 12-packs of Mountain Dew another carries bottles of Redken shampoo. They park underneath the man-high racks and start pirouetting the spinning is part of the mechanism that jacks the racks off the ground. Two dozen squat machines, like orange suitcases on wheels, scurry on the floor. “The beauty of our system,” Raffaello D’Andrea says as he paces across the warehouse, “is that you don’t have to walk over to the shelves to get things-the shelves come to you.” With that, he motions toward some 200 blue plastic racks sitting at the center of the building.
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