![]() You might, for example, think the more machines out there, the better. Flexibility in the robots’ pathways, in their destinations, in the number of robots on the field at once. The key here is flexibility-not a word that first comes to mind when you think of robots. On the human side, they blow air straight downward, but above the robots they blow out to the side, because gusts of air could blow light packages off the machines’ conveyor belts. Even the air-conditioning units hanging from the roof are modified. To navigate, they’re using a camera on their bellies that reads QR codes on the ground. Above the robots’ field, though, the skylights are covered, because the glare might throw off the machines’ sensors. Humans doing things the old way on the other side of the building, for instance, enjoy basking in the photons that pour through skylights. Ready for more complexity? Amazon had to tweak the built space itself to keep the machines happy. They were just bumping into each other and causing more pileups.” “We looked at tuning it to many different parameters and found that more speed and more acceleration actually had a reverse effect. “But it would be like having a Ferrari in downtown San Francisco-all you're doing is stop and go,” says Clarke. The temptation might be to get these machines moving as quick as possible. (The robots have sensors on either end of their conveyor belt, by the way, so if a package starts to slip off the side, the belt automatically engages to pull the package back on.) What’s the optimal speed? What’s the optimal acceleration and deceleration, given you want the deliveries to be as efficient as possible while keeping the robots from smashing into one another? After all, a bump might toss a package to the ground, which other robots would spot with their vision sensors and route around, adding yet another layer of complexity to the field. Those in turn inform how the drives themselves should be performing. ![]() To map out all this madness, Amazon runs simulations. So on top of tweaking the robots’ routes, the system can actually switch the chute assignments around to match demand, so that neither the robots nor the human sorters they work with hit any bottlenecks. How do we make sure that every row and every column looks exactly equal to each other?” The end goal is to minimize congestion through an even distribution of traffic across the field. “You want every column and every row to have an equal amount of drops. “It's basically a very large sudoku puzzle,” says Ryan Clarke, senior manager of Special Amazon Robotics Technology Applications. After each “mission,” they form a neat queue at stations along the periphery, waiting for humans to scan a new package, load the robots once again, and dispatch them on another mission. It’s a symphony of electric whirring, with robots pausing for one another at intersections and delivering their packages to the slides. My robot, a stubby mobile slab known as a drive (or more formally and mythically, Pegasus), is just one of hundreds of its kind swarming a 125,000-square-foot “field” pockmarked with chutes. Seen from above, the scale of the system is dizzying. If not-well, blame the technology, not the user. With any luck, my robot friend and I just successfully shipped a parcel to someone in Colorado. These are real packages going to real people with the help of real robots in Amazon’s sorting facility of tomorrow, not far from the Denver airport. This is not an experimental system in a robotics lab. ![]() When it gets there, the bot engages its own little conveyor belt, sliding the package off its back and down a chute to the floor below, where it can be loaded onto a truck for delivery. I hit a button to my left and off zips the robot to do my bidding, bound for one of more than 300 rectangular holes in the floor corresponding to zip codes. ![]() I grab a flat package, hold its barcode under a red laser dot, and place it on a small orange robot. They call me the Master of Robots-or at least they should.
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