The millionth robot was officially handed over at the tech giant’s Delivering the Future conference in Tokyo, Japan, where top executives told the world about their latest technological innovations in Japan and beyond.
Many of Amazon’s UK sites are already driven by robots. At its Warrington fulfilment centre, for example, lifting robots move towers of shelves around a vast warehouse floor.
Once, employees would have had to walk round a warehouse to pick goods to pack. Now the robots move the shelving units directly to them so they don’t have to leave their station.
Each of Amazon’s Hercules robots – which look like big blue versions of robotic vacuum cleaners – can carry half a tonne, as much as a concert grand piano.
Amazon took us to Japan for the conference and to see its fulfilment centre in Chiba, near Tokyo, one of the most advanced in the world with thousands of those robots moving tens of thousands of shelving units.
We also saw Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, hand over a Hercules robot to the company’s Japanese business.
Tye was inspired by R2-D2 in Star Wars to build robots that work with humans. Almost fifty years later he’s led the Amazon robot rollout – and onstage in Tokyo today he announced the launch of the AI-powered DeepFleet system that controls those million robots.
Another Amazon official said it was like an “air traffic control” system for robots. It uses AI to plot the movement of robots at Amazon centres worldwide, helping them move more efficiently.
Tye said the system cut the robot’s travel times by 10% each. And that, he said, ultimately helped customers too with “faster delivery times”.
When orders are received, the robots get to work moving packages around the factory to the humans who pick and pack them. The new DeepFleet system, Tye said, makes those robot movements more efficient, helping them find the best paths around the warehouse floors to avoid traffic jams and unnecessary waiting.
He said: “Our latest next generation fulfilment centre that we announced in Shreveport (Louisiana) has 10 times the amount of robotics in it (than a typical plant). And what we see inside is that we can process orders 25% faster in that building.
“We know our customers love fast delivery times and we build our machines in a way that allows our employees to help fuel those fast delivery times.
“To get faster delivery times, we need to put goods closer to their door, right? So in the States, we have a regionalization philosophy where we can spread those goods out using AI systems of where to predictively place goods. And the same is true globally. We think very much about how we can source more goods closer to the customer.”
He added: “So in our fulfilment centre we have thousands of robots working in parallel. What we’ve done is that we’ve reduced the travel time of those robots by 10%. And what that means is that I can have more robots moving simultaneously.
“When I have more robots moving simultaneously, I can actually store more goods. Think of all the parking places where they used to be because (now) they’re out on the road.
“But the magic of Deep Fleet is that they’re not only on the road, but they’re in a congestion-free environment. We know how to predict where the traffic jams will be, and we can optimise that using generative AI to avoid it.
“So that’s good for a customer, right? Because again, we want to have goods closer to the customer, a shorter what we call ‘last mile’, and that will actually reduce cost.”
Tye called Amazon “the world’s largest manufacturer and user of industrial robots”.
He and the other Amazon speakers in Tokyo insisted Amazon’s robots weren’t there to take jobs from workers – they are used to make operations more efficient so workers can get more done with less physical work. Tye said Amazon’s robotics expansion, which only began in 2012, was also helping to create new kinds of jobs around the world.
He said: “We have a workforce of about 2,500 new employees in Shreveport, Louisiana… and we see about an increase of 30% in those technically focused jobs. That’s great for our employees because it’s about a 40% increase in pay. They get to work with the robots and the experience has been, I think, amazing that we can roll this out.
“So if you’re interested in robotics as an employee we have opportunities for you. We also have what we call the robotic apprenticeship programme and you can learn how to maintain them, you can learn how to fix them right on the front line.”