After its US$775 million purchase of Kiva Systems in 2012, Amazon worked with the company to develop robots to work in some of its U.S. fulfillment centres in order to help speed up shipments during its busy holiday shopping season. The 15,000 robots will be used in warehouses in California, Texas, Washington, Florida and New Jersey.
This is not the only high-tech helper that Amazon uses. It also employs Robo-Stow, a large robotic arm to move orders, and is using a new inventory system to reduce unloading and processing time for orders.
Amazon has so far not eliminated any human jobs in order to make use of the Kiva robots.
