What will 10,000 robots affect to Amazon?

During our childhood, anyone would have imagined that robots like "Doraemon" might appear around us one day.

It is shown in the case that Amazon purchased Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012. They aimed to automate their own logistics center by implementing robots, since they function automatically.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this concept, robots and people working together, shows that people have got one step closer to robots.

Nowadays, robots working in Amazon’s logistics warehouse are approx. 1,000. The surprising thing was, in the 2014 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, CEO Jeff Bezos confessed that he would aim to increase this amount to 10,000 equivalent of 10 times. Not only EC industry but also logistics industry are paying attention for whether the work for people might be taken away, or there might be any downsides by robots taking over human’s work.  

What are the advantage and disadvantage for robotics? 

At Amazon, they're not planning on personnel adjustment associated with robot increase just yet. The reason is that they must first collect experimented data on how they will integrate the robots into their complex warehouse system. However, they predict that if such a system is completed, it will significantly reduce costs and reduce the time which takes to get work done.

It is recognized that, some disadvantages are that robots are not able to orally communicate and that the initial investment cost would be enormous. At present, Amazon requires enormous man-power for managing a wide variety of merchandise, but it is said that total labor costs will be reduced by replacing them with robots which don’t require air conditioning or lights. Robots would pick up ordered items from a warehouse, where heaps of items stored, and bring them to the staff. Then packing is done by personnel. By efficient role sharing, the work efficiency improves 2 to 4 times, in official announcement of Amazon. According to the official statement by Amazon, with this division of labor, efficiency would improve by 2 to 4 times.

Is standardization getting close? - on the implementation of robots

Amazon is not the only one implementing robots. Gap, famous for apparel, is also implementing logistics robots. And, Japan as well as the U.S. has the same movement. In July 2, 2014, THK (machinery part vendor), NIDEC-SHIMPO, and Tokyo University of the Arts announced that they jointly developed logistics support robot “CarriRo”. Although the Japanese logistics workplace has a lot of issues such as personnel shortage, there is a big hope that CarriRo might play a big role in solving the problems in such areas.

Human and robot - it happens to see the scene in a movie or animation world that they coexist in the same space, but there may be quite a few of those been surprised that the fact was real. It is fact that it is apt to have the scene of crisis that “they don’t need human anymore?” by hearing “implementing robots”. However, it will enable to improve the value of each other synergistically by dividing the roles as:

-  human does only what human can;

-  robot does routine work such as transferring items.