Reinventing the Warehouse

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IEEE Spectrum on Kiva’s warehouse transforming technology:

Two dozen squat machines, like orange suitcases on wheels, scurry on the floor. They park underneath the man-high racks and start pirouetting; the spinning is part of the mechanism that jacks the racks off the ground. One robot hauls shelves with 12-packs of Mountain Dew; another carries bottles of Redken shampoo. They move along straight lines and make 90-degree turns, maneuvering just 15 centimeters from each other. It’s a bit like Pac-Man.

This is the demonstration facility of Kiva Systems, a start-up in Woburn, Mass., just north of Boston, that wants to reinvent the centuries-old warehouse business. Kiva’s idea is simple: by making inventory items come to the warehouse workers rather than vice versa, you can fulfill orders faster. A computer cluster keeps track of all robots and racks on the floor, and resource-allocation algorithms efficiently orchestrate their movement.

I am still trying to get my head around exactly how this will make warehouses more efficient other than minimizing labor costs, but I thought the technology was pretty striking besides.

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