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How many human beings do you need? Web search lists 90,000 fulfillment center employees at 25 fulfillment centers, so let's assume 3600 employees per warehouse.

How many human beings do you need? Web search lists 90,000 fulfillment center employees at 25 fulfillment centers, so let's assume 3600 employees per warehouse. Amazon ships about 1million packages a day, so let's estimate 40,000 per fulfillment center per day. So that's 11 packages shipped per employee. Now, let's assume a 0.1% (probably very high) item drop. So about 40 packages will be dropped a day. How many people do we need to run out and get 40 dropped packages? Certainly not more than 40. So at this failure rate, I can reduce the number of employees by a factor of 3600/40 = 90x! Clearly, handling failure cases is a much lower workload and needs far fewer people in the pipeline. Like I said, Jingdong has a fulfillment center that does 250,000 packages a day they claim, and they say only 5 people are needed to babysit its operation.

cromwellian 8y ago
BTW, if you look at the Jingdong video, they're not doing Kiva. Kiva was designed for human packers to bring human-sized shelves to the packager. Jingdong is doing what Musk talked about: A 3D space filling factory. They've build a Voxel-like 3D positioning system of shelves. The entire warehouse space seems to be used, stacking stuff up to the ceiling. Robot sleds seem to be able to address any X/Y/Z coordinate in this space, moving down to where a robot arm unloads a palette. So basically, it's Kiva bots, but on 3D degrees of freedom. They do have Kiva-style bots for the final part that loads the wrapped packages onto the Jingdong delivery trucks.
krapp 8y ago
The thing is, Amazon's warehouses are still designed around human beings. Stowing, picking and counting in bins with random assortments and arrangements of items requires visual, spatial reasoning and fine motor skills that are still difficult to automate. The Jingdong factory doesn't appear to be using random item placement and appears designed entirely around automation. I don't think Amazon can easily automate its existing warehouses beyond a certain point (I don't know what that is, they probably haven't reached it yet) because so much effort has been put into optimizing them for a human workforce. Obviously, Amazon is going to automate away as many jobs as it can, but it's not clear that full or close to full automation would necessarily be cost effective.

cromwellian 8y ago

BTW, if you look at the Jingdong video, they're not doing Kiva. Kiva was designed for human packers to bring human-sized shelves to the packager. Jingdong is doing what Musk talked about: A 3D space filling factory. They've build a Voxel-like 3D positioning system of shelves. The entire warehouse space seems to be used, stacking stuff up to the ceiling. Robot sleds seem to be able to address any X/Y/Z coordinate in this space, moving down to where a robot arm unloads a palette. So basically, it's Kiva bots, but on 3D degrees of freedom. They do have Kiva-style bots for the final part that loads the wrapped packages onto the Jingdong delivery trucks.

krapp 8y ago

The thing is, Amazon's warehouses are still designed around human beings. Stowing, picking and counting in bins with random assortments and arrangements of items requires visual, spatial reasoning and fine motor skills that are still difficult to automate. The Jingdong factory doesn't appear to be using random item placement and appears designed entirely around automation. I don't think Amazon can easily automate its existing warehouses beyond a certain point (I don't know what that is, they probably haven't reached it yet) because so much effort has been put into optimizing them for a human workforce. Obviously, Amazon is going to automate away as many jobs as it can, but it's not clear that full or close to full automation would necessarily be cost effective.