![]() "If you have interesting ideas that have value, they will go to scale at Amazon if we're in any of those businesses," Brady said. The company is known for its regular internal contests and hackathons that recognize people for creative thinking. “I’m always looking for ways to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit among my team and figure out how to weave it into everything we do,” said Brady.Īccording to Brady, anyone at Amazon can contribute an idea that ends up having an impact, even if it's for a different division. But how do you keep driving innovation at a company that's as diversified as Amazon? It's a challenge that remains as stubborn as it is pervasive, and it's one Tye Brady thinks about often in his role as a chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. Amazon values innovation for the long-term, and developing patents to continuously improve its own systems. That idea dovetails with Amazon's Leadership Principles, one of which is "Invent and Simplify." The H Drive is just one example of how Amazon is investing in the process-improving inventions that iterate on existing technology, just as much as its big ideas for new inventions. "And sometimes it's more difficult to design things to be simple versus complex." ![]() "Complicated things are not necessarily better than simple things," Pajevic said. The reductions in size will help Amazon open new fulfillment centers closer to urban centers in Europe, resulting in faster delivery to more customers. Assembled in North Reading, Massachusetts, where Amazon Robotics is based, the smaller unit also has improved functionality, making it more efficient at navigating a fulfillment center. Hercules' chassis, or frame, allows parts to sit closer together, taking up less space, while the simpler design makes it easier to build and maintain. Aptly dubbed Hercules, or H Drive for short, the next generation robot can lift 1,250 pounds-500 pounds more than its predecessor. The team of engineers went even further than the initial goal, designing a bot that stands just 7.75 inches high and contains 50 percent fewer components, freeing up significant inventory space. ![]() So designing a smaller bot would in turn open up more space for inventory, making smaller buildings feasible and enabling faster shipping times and better prices for customers. Many fulfillment centers are more than one million square feet – about 28 football fields, making these buildings a fight for space. The first-gen robots are a foot tall, but the goal for the next-gen robots was to cut their height to 9 or 10 inches. As The Verge notes, the company said it's not looking to replace human workers even though an internal report that recently leaked revealed that the company expects to "deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024." An Amazon robotics lead told Forbes that "replacing people with machines is just a fallacy" that could end with a company going out of business.There are currently more than 100,000 of these robots working throughout Amazon’s global fulfillment centers. The e-commerce giant has introduced several robots over the years, and it has always emphasized that their purpose is to improve safety at its warehouses. Amazon explained that its camera runs at 120 frames per second and is powered by computer vision and machine learning technology. With this scanning capability in place, human workers don't even need to pause while sorting packages: The system can quickly recognize a package the passes its camera. Currently, workers have to scan barcodes on packages using hand scanners - this technology will eliminate the need to do that. Amazon is currently testing a prototype that's able to lift boxes up to 50 pounds and expects to deploy the robotic arm to fulfillment centers by next year.įinally, the company has also revealed that it's working on an AI technology that can automatically scan packages. Artificial intelligence and computer vision enable it to sort packages correctly. Cardinal is a robotic arm that picks up packages, reads their labels and then places them in the appropriate cart for the next stage of the shipping process. Instead, it was about people and technology working safely and harmoniously together to deliver for our customers," it wrote.Īnother new robot called Cardinal was also designed with the idea of reducing risk of employee injuries in mind. "From the early days of the Kiva acquisition, our vision was never tied to a binary decision of people or technology. In fact, the e-commerce giant stressed that its robots were designed to create a safer workplace for people. Amazon's aim is to automate the handling of its package carts so as to reduce the need for human workers to manually move them around its facilities.
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