Blue-collar robots don’t really get the press they deserve. These dedicated, well designed, and efficient workers provide unparalleled improvements in almost every major industry. Let’s face it, though, they are rarely photogenic. Singularity Hub has covered a lot of the amazing human-like robots out there. Today, let’s take a look at one of the most promising blue-collar bots: KIVA Systems’ distribution center robots. These warehouse workhorses provide a new way of sorting, storing, and shipping products. Quiet Logistics, a third party distribution center, just opened a KIVA exclusive warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts. With over a 1000 of these robots already in use, the promise of robotized warehouses as a standard is well on its way.

The KIVA bots are short squat orange lifters that glide under storage racks, lifting and moving them where they need to go. They’re guided by a very simple grid of stickers attached to the floor. Wifi communications between bots and redundant clusters of servers keep robots from colliding on the grid. No easy task considering that a single warehousing company could use up to 500 of the little orange lifters.

With KIVA, the racks are brought to the human workers and not the other way around. This system eliminates the need for endless walking. Instead of having many workers work on the same order, the KIVA system allows for a single touch approach. With fewer hands used on each order, productivity increases, errors decrease and the work process is streamlined. Zappos (a KIVA customer) claims order to ship times of as little as 12 minutes.

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