New robots—smarter and faster—are taking over warehouses
Most picking jobs will be done by bots
A DECADE AGO Amazon started to introduce robots into its “fulfilment centres”, as online retailers call their giant distribution warehouses. Instead of having people wandering up and down rows of shelves picking goods to complete orders, the machines would lift and then carry the shelves to the pickers. That saved time and money. Amazon’s sites now have more than 350,000 robots of various sorts deployed worldwide. But even that is not enough to secure its future.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The bots taking over the warehouse”
From the February 12th 2022 edition
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