Though last Mobile Mondays conference was much more valuable than yesterdays, there still were some good things about it. Basically, I have two points:
- Lithuanian small businesses go to invest to Belarus and cannot get it’s weird lifestyle.
- Robots serve Amazon!
I met my old school friend that is working as a contractor for Kiva Systems that do shell backend (I hope I got it right) for automated warehouses. In short, here is the video.
That smart orange robots use special stickers on the floor for navigation. They have two collision cameras in the front and back and are controlled by special pathfinding maps. When a new warehouse is built, special wise human beings create optimal distribution of the bookshelfs you saw in the video and a map with optimal pathfinding for robots. New route map would be installed to each robot so it new the fastest path between the requested warehouse item and a human operator.
Say, when you book a pair of new Converse chucks, system figures out their location in the warehouse and asks robot to take the shelf with the item to the human operator. Operator sees the robot with the shelf on it’s back and selects required box (robot turns on the lights on the corresponding shelf slot), scans it and gives another robot that pushes it to a kind of outbox.
Warehouse workers are very happy with that system as they got personal workplaces that they can decorate with wife’s and kid’s photos, bring a boom box and so on.
What’s even more interesting, those smarties (now try to guess, if I am referring to warehouse workers ;-)) can be utilized for some really custom solutions. Say, relocation of a warehouse can be done very easily. Robots get a map and take all required staff to a trailer, when trailer arrives to a new destination, robots deliver goods to a new location.
All this look inspiring. You can dig to wikipedia (oh man, it does not mention Amazon among customers, but I am saying what I was told by insider ;-)) for more info.
