Technical limitations of warehouse management robots and future breakthroughs

In 2010, Amazon bought the Kiva system for $750 million and wanted to use it to defend its position in the huge robotic algorithm market. This is hard to say for many Kiva consumers, including of course Quiet Logistics. They have been working with Kiva's robots to support many customers' central warehouses. Once the contract between Quite Logistics and Kiva is terminated, they need to find new robots.

Many companies, including Adept, Fetch, Clearpath, IAMRobotics and Magazino, have realized the enormous value of Kiva robots and the sudden emptiness that has emerged, so they are targeting the mechanized warehouse space. Quiet Logistics decided not to rely on the new platform developed by other companies and began to develop its own robots. In 2014, Quiet Logistics' internal robot project collaborated with Locus's robotics project, and in May of that year they received $8 million in financing in Round A. BruceWelty is the chairman of Quiet Logistics and co-founder of Locus Robotics. I have asked him what he thinks about Kiva's robots, how to develop robots from scratch, and why warehouse robotics is dominated by software problems.

The Locus robot was originally designed to work with humans to perform tasks such as filling out orders in the warehouse. In an area where the map is drawn ahead of time, it uses a lidar to self-locate and then confirms the position with a camera and barcode. The robot knows where each object is in the warehouse. When the object appears in the order, the robot automatically navigates and waits for the worker to pick it up.

Workers often have to patrol the warehouse. When they see the robot waiting, they can find the items needed for the order on the screen and then remove them. The robot then moves to the next object storage point or moves to the loading and unloading location. This is a very efficient system, because people don't have to carry anything, not to jump on the whole warehouse. Instead, all they have to do is identify the objects and remove them from the shelf.

Next, the author visited Bruce Welty, chairman of Locus Robotics.

IEEE Spectrum: Can you give us a brief introduction to the history of Locus?

Bruce Welty: Locus was incubated from Quiet Logistics, they were actually the same company. We set up Locus because Quiet is a user of Kiva robots. When Amazon acquired Kiva, we decided we needed to have our own technology. In 2010, when we started to get familiar with Kiva, we considered designing a unique robot. We like many aspects of Kiva and we have a lot of dissatisfaction with it. Therefore, we always want to make the next generation of robots.

IEEE Spectrum: What aspects of Kiva do you dislike? How do you remind you and Locus to create a robot you want?

Bruce Welty: The few things we like about Kiva include ease of use, price and security. As you can imagine, operability must be the first element we need to consider in our research and development. Therefore, Kiva's R&D team did not consider too much price-related things and how to perform tasks. They have not considered the different effects of its weight and safety – because the area in which robots operate is often without humans.

Gradually, a lot of things started to make us crazy. First of all, the protective pod is very expensive. Robots walk in open air, and dust can easily fall into their interiors, causing 90% of maintenance accidents. We also don't like Kiva staying in the corner motionless. We are aware of the importance of keeping control of this robot. We don't want to create a robot that doesn't need to protect the pod.

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