Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses

Next time you order a new pair of skinny jeans from Gap.com, you should know that you are helping welcome in the hive-mind robot overlords of retail.

Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you.

All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour.

"It's a major game-changer. There's no question about that. You can increase productivity immensely," said Michael Levans, editorial director for a group of supply-chain trade magazines like Logistics Management. "The Zappos guys claim that from the moment you put your order in and it is submitted to the time the box is on the dock and ready to be put on a truck is 12 minutes."

The robots, which in the largest distribution center currently number over 500, are built by a small company called Kiva Systems (no relation to the microfinance outfit). In total, they've installed more than 1,000 bots at a dozen warehouses and are growing quickly. By the end of this year, they expect single locations to have systems with 1,000 of the machines.

Dreamed up and executed by old M.I.T. buddies, these teams of retail robots presage an automated future in which multiagent robotic systems put computer science theories into practice.

"The basic technology will be the de facto way to run a warehouse," said Pete Wurman, the computer science Ph.D. who wrote the code that controls the robots. "We'll start to see these same techniques that become the de facto techniques in manufacturing."

While the humanoid robotic visions of the 1950s have never come to Jetsons-like fruition, less sexy robots have become indispensable parts of many industries and service professions. A recent report by the International Federation of Robotics found that 6.5 million robots serve humanity around the world. Still, most of them are standalone or primarily operated by human beings. Kiva robots are different: They're both autonomous and networked.

What that means for workers in the warehouse is that the Henry Ford-era distribution system of the conveyor belt has been broken into pieces and distributed across the entire operation. Any worker (sometimes called "pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out.

"Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse," Wurman said.

The system adjusts to the nature of the products and workers, too. In a typical setup, the humans are placed around the edges of the room. As the robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the warehouse for greater efficiency. More popular products end up around the edges of the warehouse while more obscure products, like those acid-washed bell bottoms, end up buried deep in the stacks. The self-tuning nature of the system creates big efficiencies.

"We find that it's two to four times more efficient [than the average warehouse]," said Wurman. "A big chunk of the benefit comes from the fact that we've eliminated all of the walking."

The success of Kiva Systems could help teams of autonomous robots gain ground outside the computer science lab.

"I could see some of the techniques that we are developing being applied outside the warehouse," Wurman said. "When we have autonomous automobiles, you could imagine they'll have similar types of coordination problems."

But autonomy won't work for all situations, Lonnie Freiburger, a robotics specialist with the U.S. Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development & Engineering Center. The military is looking more at "semi-autonomous" bots, rather than ones with relatively full control over their actions.

But Freiburger and the Kiva Systems engineers both agree that robots don't have to be humanoid to be useful. In fact, endowing them with characteristics humans don't have can be more useful than giving them eyes or opposable thumbs.

"Sure, it's nice to have robots that can do what the humans can do, but it's also nice to have robots to do what humans can't do," Freiburger said. "Humans have physical limitations but the robots don't necessarily have those limitations."

Unlike the Honda ASIMO, Kiva robots don't look anything like a human or try to perceive the world through humanlike senses. They don't use sophisticated visual sensors to navigate; instead, they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that's stuck onto the floor of the warehouse.

That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working around the people, cruising around in the dark.

While that may sound disconcerting, for now, at least, robots remain our underlings — fetching our underwear, delivering our jeans — not our overlords. At many sites, workers have begun to name their robots, complete with "Hello, My Name Is" name tags. From there, it's only a short step to playing fetch with your robot.

"One of our customers calls those name tags tattoos, and the robots are adopted by employees," said Mitch Rosenberg, Kiva Systems' VP of Marketing. "Your robot sends you a card on your birthday — this is a corporate sponsored thing, so I asked the management why they let them do it. They said, 'We do it because the employees get a lot of joy, a lot of happiness out of anthropomorphizing the robots and turning them into pets.'"