- Amazon has invested heavily in robotics and automation for its fulfillment centers.
- Its robots include mobile units, robotic arms, and sortation systems.
- Business Insider got an inside look at how the robots are made in facilities outside Boston.
Amazon is making big bets on robotics and automation.
What started with its $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 has grown to include a fleet of more than 750,000 robots and an operation that employs more than 16,000 people.
"We have really pioneered new work and allowed Amazon to be more productive and take care of our frontline employees by improving the safety bar," Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, said.
I recently got to see the facilities in North Reading and Westborough, Massachusetts, where Amazon builds and tests its warehouse robots. It was a sprawling look at what modern manufacturing looks like in the US.
Take a look inside:
I started the day at the North Reading office. A lineup of Amazon's robots past and present greets visitors at the entrance.
The green one at the front is Amazon's latest mobile drive unit, Proteus, which can sense objects and humans in its path and move around them. The robots get older the further along the line you go.
The facility is huge, stretching 209,000 square feet. From my view on the mezzanine, I could see mobile drive units that had just been built on the assembly line.
The blue robots, called Hercules, move pods of items around a fenced area of a fulfillment center. Each Hercules robot can lift a pod that weighs up to 1,250 pounds. The green robots, called Proteus, do similar tasks but move autonomously.
The North Reading facility was previously home to Kiva Robotics before Amazon acquired the company in 2012.
Julie Mitchell, director of robotic sortation technology at Amazon Robotics, told me how the company approaches robot design.
She said that Amazon works with teams in its fulfillment centers to understand which areas could be made more efficient with automation. Robots go through early alpha testing and then beta testing before they are ready for mass production.
"We work backwards from our customer needs and think about which systems will help enable better delivery and faster speeds to our customers," she said. "We look to try to develop systems that will add value within one to two years in our fulfillment network."
Looking to the left, I could also see other robots being tested.
On the middle floor are Pegasus robots, which transport packages around sortation centers.
The yellow robotic arm below is Robin, which uses suction to pick up packages.
I got a closer look at the Pegasus robots as we made our way down to the manufacturing floor.
They zoomed around the floor, testing out new software updates.
The Pegasus robot is an evolution of the Hercules robot, using the same base but with a conveyor belt on top. The orange robots are older, from before Amazon rebranded its Prime services to blue.
I also got my first up-close look at Proteus. The eyes indicate he's spotted me.
Proteus is designed to work alongside employees on a shipping dock. Those workers don't get specific training to work with robots.
"It was really important to us to make Proteus intuitive to understand so the human-robot interaction is seamless," Mitchell said. "We used the eyes as a way to communicate."
When we got down to the manufacturing floor, I saw this poster that had been signed by Jeff Bezos.
Amazon has now built more than 750,000 mobile robots, in addition to its robotic arms and sortation systems.
Erica McClosky, director of manufacturing and technical operations at Amazon Robotics, leads teams that build and test robots before they are sent to fulfillment centers.
About 300 people work on the physical side of building and maintaining Amazon's robotic fleet. The majority of those employees are on the assembly line, while others receive and ship materials and test and repair robots.
"We're in a very controlled, stable environment here, so we're able to, for all of our new products, continuously look at how we optimize the entire flow," McClosky said.
Here, workers put together subassemblies that will be incorporated into Proteus' design.
Amazon's manufacturing stations have built-in automation, too, including torque tools.
"If you're supposed to install, let's say, four fasteners, it'll make sure that you only store four fasteners and that it has the right rotation," McClosky said.
Employees receive parts to be installed on the robots. The parts are scanned so that they can be traced as they travel through Amazon's ecosystem.
"If there were ever to be a problem, we could trace back and understand what's happening," McClosky said.
Amazon sources its robotic parts globally as well as from some local suppliers.
I saw one assembly line building Hercules robots and another building Proteus. Lights above each station signal green when everything is in place and red when something is wrong.
The North Reading facility has four assembly lines with 10 stations each. Employees at each station complete their assembly tasks in about seven and a half minutes, using a lift assist for heavy items.
The last step of the assembly process for Hercules is putting the blue cover on top.
Amazon asked that I not take close-up photos of the robots without their covers on due to the sensitivity of the technology.
The assembly process for Hercules takes about an hour from start to finish. When the robots are complete, they're picked up from the assembly line by this lift and placed onto the floor.
Lift assists are in place in various parts of the manufacturing process so that workers don't strain to pick up heavy objects.
After the robots come off the line, they take a few minutes to get their batteries charged.
The robots' batteries get charged to about 80% capacity before they are sent out to fulfillment centers.
They then line up to be tested in these blue-fenced structures. McClosky said Amazon's testing technology is one of the biggest and most helpful innovations it's rolled out in recent years.
She said that Amazon used to test its robots by filling big pods with bricks and having them drive around the factory floor for hours.
"What used to take us hours for testing here on the production floor is now done in minutes," McClosky said. "It's looking at environments that it would see in the fulfillment center, so under different loads, making sure that it is fully, fully functional."
Proteus has its own diagnostic center where it calibrates its cameras and sensors to maintain "clear vision," Mitchell said.
Proteus uses AI to "see" the space it's navigating and decide whether it can safely navigate around an object or needs to stop moving forward.
Hercules is the robot Amazon has made the most units of over the years.
"It's kind of our workhorse in the fulfillment centers," McClosky said.
After the robots have been charged and tested, they line up for "robot graduation."
No caps and gowns here — "graduating" just means they're ready to be put to use.
The robots actually drive themselves to the loading dock and put themselves on an individual pallet.
Since Hercules can't detect humans the same way that Proteus can, this is a restricted area.
They're now ready to be shipped out to fulfillment centers and be put to work.
They'll be shipped using the loading docks seen in the background.
Next up, I watched a robotic arm called Robin pick up packages from a conveyor belt. Robin works in conjunction with Pegasus, the mobile robot with a conveyor belt we saw earlier.
The packages I saw Robin pick up were all Amazon-branded, but the robot also frequently encounters packaging from third-party brands using Amazon's fulfillment centers.
"We're constantly using AI to train Robin to see different package types, different surfaces, different types of materials that it has to grasp," Mitchell said. "We can change the way we grasp it by changing which actuator we send down to pick up the package. That helps cover the gamut of different shapes."
I also saw Proteus in action, practicing transporting carts around the floor.
Unlike Amazon's other robots, Proteus doesn't need to be kept in a fenced-off space away from people.
This robotic arm, Cardinal, scans packages' labels, determines which cart to place them into, and tightly packs them in like Tetris.
Cardinal works in conjunction with Proteus.
"When Cardinal finishes the stacking and creates a complete container, it will signal to Proteus to come and take that container and replenish that container," Mitchell said. "The two robotic systems working together has created an end-to-end automated path from sorting to loading that container onto our trailers and our ship dock."
It's a powerful machine.
I could feel the ground shake as Cardinal worked.
After the tour wrapped up, we traveled to the other Amazon Robotics facility in the Boston area.
It's located about 50 miles away, in Westborough, Massachusetts.
Both this facility and the one in North Reading also have corporate offices and research and development labs located directly off the manufacturing floor.
Amazon views this as a competitive advantage in that it allows for a more direct feedback loop. McClosky said that engineers and manufacturing staff work "shoulder to shoulder."
This facility is even bigger than the one in North Reading. Looking out from the mezzanine, it felt like the factory floor stretched on forever.
It covers about 350,000 square feet of space.
Tye Brady, the chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, spoke about the work Amazon is doing in physical AI.
He compared the way Amazon is thinking about robotics and physical AI to the way people thought about the computer in the 1950s.
"I think if you were to roll ahead in time, you're going to see more and more physical AI agents used as tools to help people be more human, to help people be more capable of who they are, to allow people to connect to one another more readily," he said.
I got a good look at Amazon's storage and sortation robot, Sequoia, from above.
Sequoia is a containerized storage system that brings pods over to a station where employees pick items out of totes so that they can be shipped to customers.
On the left is a traditional fabric pod that can be moved by Amazon's mobile robots and brought to employees for picking.
Brady said the items stored in each pod are somewhat random and chosen more so to fill the space. This is how Amazon has traditionally stored items, and it's actually what the original Kiva system did even before it was part of Amazon.
Amazon's newest robot, Vulcan, can pick from these pods using a sense of touch.
However, Sequoia uses plastic containers to store items instead of the yellow fabric pods. Brady pointed to a screen that displays what the robot is doing at each moment.
The totes have all kinds of goods, from water bottles to toys to Amazon Basics cables.
"This is where automation really helps us because we can take just about any object that fits inside one of these totes and place it in there," Brady said.
A unique code on each tote helps keep track of what's inside.
The robotic system brings the totes to an employee work station. The conveyor belt is positioned at the optimal height for picking in order to reduce injuries.
Brady explained how Sequoia helps workers in fulfillment centers to pick customers' orders.
"When a customer goes on Amazon.com and they make an order, we look at the entirety of the Amazon network, we figure out which building has the goods closest to the customer, how we can make a meaningful delivery route for that customer, and then at the right time, we'll call the right pod to a station where we can now have the goods that the customer has ordered inside this tote," he said.
Sequoia can also be used to process and stow items that are just arriving at a fulfillment center.
"I just pick the item out and then place it into another container to be packed and processed downstream," he said.
Our last stop on the tour was to see the Sparrow robotic arm.
Unlike the other robotic arms I saw earlier, Sparrow handles individual items rather than packages.
Sparrow is responsible for consolidating items into totes. Hercules robots bring pods to the Sparrow station.
"The robotic system extracts the tote, presents it to the Sparrow arm," Brady said. "That arm has its own end effector on it, and what it's going to do is pick up objects and try to create a more full tote."
Sparrow can pick up more than 200 million different items.
It uses an AI system that looks down from above to differentiate between objects, look for damage, and determine the best path to place it into a bin.
"That's really the holy grail when it comes to manipulation: being able to successfully identify and manipulate a huge variety of goods," Brady said.
