Zappos.com Installs Robots in Warehouse to Fill Orders

[Terry Olaes]

Zappos.com, an online retailer known for shoes, has finished installing an army of autonomous orange robots to help fill orders more quickly. The Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System will bring the ordered items to workers, rather than having the workers run around the floor with carts. I’d love to see a video of these things at work.

Retail items are kept in crates or moveable shelves, which Kiva calls pods, instead of on conventional warehouse shelves. Once you place your order, a robot is notified by a Kiva server over a Wi-Fi network. It then autonomously drives around the warehouse, picking up the pods containing your items and stacking them as part of its load.

 

[RussianHAXOR]

Freaking awesome, i wanna see this when they have like a flood of orders.

 

[RussianHAXOR]

here is a video!

http://www.kivasystems.com/solution-products-item.html

 

[RussianHAXOR]

sorry can you merge these?

item fetch - http://www.kivasystems.com/solution-products-item.html
order fetch - http://www.kivasystems.com/solution-products-order.html
case fetch - http://www.kivasystems.com/solution-products-case.html

 

[Sent]

Sounds sorta like what newegg does

 

[n64man120]

I almost took an internship with these Kiva guys. They're R&D facility is pretty impressive, lots of intelligence in the robots for sure

 

[w1retap]

Zappos is pretty awesome. I've ordered quite a few pairs of shoes from them. The robotic stuff is cool. =)