Technology

As far as I can make out, Amazon’s warehouses are highly structured, extremely organized, very tidy, absolute raging messes. Everything in an Amazon warehouse is (usually) exactly where it’s supposed to be, which is typically jammed into some pseudorandom fabric bin the size of a shoebox along with a bunch of other pseudorandom crap. Somehow, this turns out to be the most space and time efficient way of doing things, because (as we’ve written about before) you have to consider the process of stowing items away in a warehouse as well as the process of picking them, and that involves some compromises in favor of space and speed.

For humans, this isn’t so much of a problem. When someone orders something on Amazon, a human can root around in those bins, shove some things out of the way, and then pull out the item that they’re looking for. This is exactly the sort of thing that robots tend to be terrible at, because not only is this process slightly different every single time, it’s also very hard to define exactly how humans go about it.

As you might expect, Amazon has been working very very hard on this picking problem. Today at an event in Germany, the company announced Vulcan, a robotic system that can both stow and pick items at human(ish) speeds.