Amazon's shipping robots are helping get packages and gifts out to customers faster this holiday season while trimming the online retailer's bottom line.
The pancake-shaped robots with the strength of a couple of NFL players are zipping around Amazon shipping centers, delivering seven-foot high stacks of items to employees from all around the warehouse for delivery,
according to Live Science.com.
Ten of Amazon's 109 shipping centers are using the robots from Kiva Systems, which Amazon purchased in 2012. Some 15,000 packing robots include robotic arms that can lift big bundles of products, a computer system to sort items, along with the darting robots that can carry up some 750 pounds of products to employees, noted Live Science.com.
The flat-wheeled robots roam Amazon's shipping center via a grid system embedded into the warehouse floor and can find items by scanning bar codes as they roll pass them,
Before this invasion conjure up fears of Skynet from "The Terminator" movies, Amazon reported that there is still plenty of work for humans to do since the company sold 426 items per second during Cyber Monday in 2013 and expected to rival those numbers this year.
Amazon announced that it hired 80,000 seasonal workers for the holiday season to handle Cyber Monday and Christmas holiday purchases, a 14 percent increase from last year.
"The Amazon fulfillment teams are dedicated to innovating in our fulfillment centers to increase speed of delivery while enabling greater local selection at lower costs for our customers," said Dave Clark, Amazon's senior vice president of worldwide operations and customer service. "The advancements in our latest fulfillment centers hit all three of these customer desires while continuing to provide a work environment that is great for employees."
Shawn Milne of Janney Capital Markets said in a report over the summer,
according to The Associated Press, that Amazon's robotic workers could result in a cost saving for the company of anywhere from $450 million to $900 million annually.
Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities told the AP that Amazon's robots could have the same effect on the company that robotics did on the assembly line at automotive plants in reducing the number of worker hours needed to build a car.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.