The celebration was kicked off by Kiva CEO and founder, Mick Mountz, who recounted the moment he first envisioned a robotic warehouse. At the time he was working for Webvan Group, an online grocery delivery service that eventually went under. The thought occurred to Mountz: What if the products could walk and talk on their own? He reasoned that a warehouse could vastly improve its efficiency if, rather than people going to pick the products, the products went to the people. Out of this idea was born an army of “picker” robots: short and squarish motors that retrieve merchandise racks and bring them to human pickers.

An area was setup so the guests–mostly Kiva customers, potential customers, partners, and academics–could see the robots in action. Like a colony of flattened and orange R2D2s, about 20 or 30 of their F-series robots scooted back-and-forth, constantly avoiding imminent collisions by inches. They almost seemed enthusiastic as they went about their work, picking up racks and toting them aimlessly around before realizing that no human pickers were to be found in the demonstration area. Undeterred, the robots would set the rack down and cheerfully go get another one as if to say, “C’mon, let’s get to work!”

And their robotic enthusiasm would be appropriate. In these times of tightened job markets, these blue collar bots have got the skills companies are looking for. The need for the 160,000-square foot North Reading facility speaks to Kiva’s growing success, and the growing presence of robotics inside e-commerce warehouse operations. Kiva, Mountz mentioned, has robots in 16 different US states and 4 countries worldwide. Customers are reporting that Kiva’s automated “pick, pack and ship” is increasing productivity six- to ten-fold. Next day shipping is becoming less impressive as realtime order fulfillment ships within 15 minutes. Named the 6th fastest growing company in the US by Inc. 500 two years ago, Kiva enables industry leaders such as The Gap, Staples, Saks 5th Avenue, Offce Depot, Crate and Barrel, and Walgreens to fulfill millions of orders per year. Kiva is currently in talks with the big fishes of e-commerce Amazon and Wal-Mart. It’s clear that the robotic warehouse has arrived and large e-commerce companies will no doubt suffer if they’re slow to adopt it.

Kiva robots come in two sizes. The standard F-bot in the middle can lift 1,000 lbs. The larger model lifts 3,000 lbs.

The breakthrough technology that is transforming warehouses allows a human picker to perform quickly and accurately with little or no training, all while standing in the same place. When an order is placed, a server assigns the merchandise to one of a number of pickers on the floor. A robot goes to the appropriate rack, screws itself in from underneath, then brings the rack to the picker. Upon reaching the picker a laser pointer above the picker’s head–part of the “light-to-light” system–will mark the bin that holds the merchandise. The picker grabs the merchandise, scans it, places it in another rack with a second lit up bin, and it’s off to packing. Hitting a button on the rack confirms the pick, and the robot rushes away to return the rack to storage.

As you can imagine the orders typically come pretty quickly, and the robots with them. A picker will often have a conga line of robot-driven racks feeding them merchandise. And that’s the whole idea. Without the need to walk up and down warehouse aisles the pickers can spend all of their time picking. See how easy it is in the video below.

The replenishment process works in reverse. A worker scans the product upon arrival and a robot fetches the rack. Again, the laser pointer will tell the worker which bin the product goes into, and then the drive unit’s off to return the replenished rack. The replenishment technology is smart and takes advantage of the constant mobility of the racks to squeeze even more efficiency into the warehouse. The system software tracks the frequency at which all of the products are ordered. The constant shuffling of racks allows the drive units to move the more popular products towards the outside of the storage floor and closer to the pickers. If you tracked suntan lotion, for example, you’d see it migrate outward during the summer months, and back in towards the floor center during the winter months.

I asked Scott Davis, Senior Manager of Quality Systems, if he thought the system had much room for improvement. With an emphatic yes he explained that not all Kiva customers are the same, that each has their own unique requirements for the system. As new customers present new requirements the system will be developed in unanticipated ways. Engineers are currently testing a new feature called the “hybrid highway,” where robots of different sizes will work together, crisscrossing on the same floor space. Right now the robots have to be in the same weight class to mingle.

The guidance system driving the robots is pretty smart too. An underneath camera watches for fiducias–stickers that map out the floor. Upon reaching these waypoints the server which tracks the robots tells it whether or not the road ahead is clear. The system is so precise that one robot class doesn’t have brakes–it glides to a stop. Because precision is so important, the fiducias are laser-mapped to their locations. But even then placement can be a little off. Doesn’t matter. The robots remember which fiducias are off and adjust their paths accordingly.

The Kiva system also allows customers to adjust to the terrain. “Our customers are enjoying something very novel about the Kiva solution, which is flexibility,” says Mountz. “Normally automation constrains you to some particular capacity. With Kiva everything is modular and mobile and portable.” He adds that customers “can start small and add to their Kiva systems as their business grows, thereby deferring capital investment and using their capital more efficiently.”

The mobility that Mountz mentions also allows the entire system to be moved once a business has outgrown the walls of its warehouse. “Last summer we moved an entire warehouse with a customer in a weekend. Didn’t miss a single order.”

A typical Kiva solution includes about 30 to 50 robots and will run customers $1 to $2 million depending on features. All of the Kiva robots are assembled and tested in the North Reading facility. They gave us a tour of the manufacturing floor, but because the technology is proprietary we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Like the robots, the humans that build them are working efficiently. Assembly is completed at a series of stations, each of which has a defined amount of time allotted to the task. If an assembler finishes a few minutes early he or she moves to another station to pitch in. The facility is also fully capable to test the brains that go into the bodies. A test lab area includes a simulated warehouse floor custom configured to the new customers needs. Hardware and software engineers collaborate here to test firmware, new rack designs as well as new picking and packing station designs. The real world test for the newbies is a 24-hour simulated run.

The ribbon cutting honors fell to Mountz. The stars of the show then marched like a graduating class one after the other through the cut ribbon. Their march–and the march of other robots–will continue from the manufacturing floor to warehouses across the world, with the purpose not to replace, but to help.

For now.

As time goes by our robotic co-workers are going to get smarter. And as they do, they’re going to want to update their resumes. Who knows, someday we humans may be out of the job altogether.

[video credit: TAKU19720116 via YouTube]
video: Kiva Systems

What's the secret behind Diapers.com? KIVA robots.

Starting in July, Quidsi, Inc will try to dominate drugstore retailers with Soap.com, an online megastore that will sell 25,000 products – everything from toilet paper to makeup. According to Quidsi’s recent press release Soap.com will offer next day delivery for most of the country for free! How can they manage such fast order placement? Robots. As seen in the video below, KIVA robots allow Quidsi’s first megastore, Diapers.com, to turn their warehouse into a well oiled package processing machine. These same bots could help Soap.com conquer the world…of bathroom goods.

Quidsi struck gold in 2005 with the launch of Diapers.com by creating a super-reliable online retail outlet for baby products. The site sold more than $180 million last year, and is projected to hit $300 million for 2010. Soap.com could have a similar trajectory. The KIVA robotics system, as we’ve seen before, dramatically increases warehouse processing speed to keep up with the large orders that come through. Robots bring products to humans who stand in place, picking and sorting quickly. It’s a great example of how man and machine working together can maximize the efficiency of each.

With Soap.com, this system will become even more necessary as there will be 25,000 items and 900 brands to be found in the warehouse. And that’s just for the initial launch in July. By the end of 2010 there will be 40k products and 100k by the end of 2011. All at prices up to 25% less than at neighborhood stores. That’s going to really boost Soap.com’s sales.

Online retail is already a huge industry, and it’s only getting bigger as customers come to trust that the goods they order will arrive quickly and cheaply. Whether or not Quidsi is the one to do it, the $100+ billion drugstore market it going to get pulled online. As so many others have and will. Automated warehouses are one key ingredient in making it happen. Not exactly what I expected when I thought about robots giving people bubble baths, but hey, the future is full of suprises.

[screen capture and video credit: Quidsi]
[source: Quidsi Press Release, Twitter Feed]

KIVA's warehouse robot is set to become an industry standard. Photo: Joshua Dalsimer

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.

Check out this great Boston.com video highlighting the KIVA system:

It’s really the combination of software and robots that makes the KIVA system so promising. With adaptive storage, random access to workers, quick reorganization, and removing the need to batch, we are seeing a truly new approach to the traditional warehouse. That Gap, Zappos, Staples, have all converted at least part of their warehouses to KIVA shows the industry’s willingness to adapt to the better technology. Quiet Logistics KIVA-only warehouse is already serving Music Parts Plus, a major online retailer.

Never colliding, and never off duty, the KIVA robots work in a full-scale warehouse, moving racks to be processed by humans.

Man and Bot – the next great buddy movie

As remarkable as KIVA’s robots are, I think they are just one indication of a developing paradigm. Human laborers are an integral (and highly valued) part of the warehouse system. KIVA bots move the racks, but human hands move and scan items. This sort of human-robot integration highlights how separating tasks into robot-friendly and human-friendly steps is an ideal path to efficiency. Creating human-like robots is a complicated and difficult task. Although there have been great leaps forward in this field recently, it may take many years for it to be cost efficient to replace all human laborers with equivalent robots.

I think the KIVA human-robot interaction provides a better solution. In all fields of manual robotic use (manufacture, warfare, shipping, transportation, medicine, etc) we may benefit from a planned and dedicated approach that seeks to maximize efficiency by dividing tasks in a systematic way between humans and machines. We are already experimenting with such an approach, just look at the auto-industry, or think about how many high-tech instruments are integral to your doctor’s office.

Human-robot teamwork may only be a temporary solution (eventually robots may replace all human laborers in manual fields), but for ten or twenty years it could provide the best approach to including robots in the workforce without eliminating the human jobs on which many economies depend. Proponents of a robotic workforce often claim that new jobs will open up in service and consulting sectors. Some singularity enthusiasts contend that we ourselves will merge with that robotic workforce anyway. In either case, fostering robot-human cooperation is a great way to gently transition from our current system to our eventual one (whatever form it may take).

The cooperation is seemingly already building between man and machine in many of the KIVA warehouses. Mitch Rosenberg, VP of Marketing at KIVA, says that human workers are giving name tags and other identifying marks to their favorite robots. At some companies, “the robots” send you a birthday card each year. We have a hard time, it seems, avoiding anthropomorphizing and adopting robots as pets. And that’s okay. They may not be cute, but blue-collar bots are a working man’s best friend.

Here’s two videos for you, one goes into the KIVA system in greater depth and the other…well, it’s the brainchild of an intern, enjoy: