Meet The Little Orange Robots Making Amazon’s Warehouses More Humane

For $775 million Amazon has acquired robot company Kiva Solutions, looking to “improve productivity” in those fulfillment centers we’ve heard such un-fun things about. Specifically, the little orange bots will bring products to workers, who as of now can walk up to 13 to 15 miles a day hand-picking and delivering items,according to a report from last September. Amazon bought the organization hoping to improve its margins — a packer working with Kiva bots can fulfill three to four times as many orders per hour, according to Kiva via The Wall Street Journal. But it looks like the tech will also reduce the exhausting walking that Amazon warehouse work now requires. […]

The robot to human delivery system will replace this kind of painful-sounding work we hear Amazon’s warehouse workers now experience, as described last September in a Morning Call exposé: 

One former temporary warehouse employee said he worked seven months before he was terminated for not working fast enough. In his 50s, he worked 10 hours a day, four days a week as a picker, plucking items from bins and delivering them to packers who put them in boxes for shipment. He would walk 13 to 15 miles daily

Read more. [Image: kiva]