Amazon opened its largest warehouse in MA, a five-story facility with ~4 million square feet of space. The fulfillment center cost about $400 Million to build and has 12 miles of conveyor belts to handle hundreds of thousands of orders per day. It has thousands of robots to automate the movement of goods.
The warehouse has three types of robots and is designed to handle items <18.5 inches on a side which fit in plastic totes. On the first floor, workers unload cases of goods from trucks and unpack all items into totes. The totes are then sent to one of the top four floors where items are stored.
On each storage floor, a central space is fenced off for Amazon’s Hercules robots – round, flat machines on wheels that move under tall shelving pods filled with stored items. The robots move the shelving pods where needed. Each pod has four sides of shelves and each side has 30 or more cubbies holding different items.
Around the edge of the floor, workers receive totes filled with items to be stored. As they lift goods from the tote, an optical scanner identifies each item. A Hercules robot brings a shelving pod to the worker station. The worker can place the item in any cubby on the pod that has enough room; a Lidar sensor tracks where the item is placed. The Walmart system knows where every item is.
At other stations, workers fulfill customer orders. Empty totes are filled with orders and returned to the first floor, where orders are packaged/shipped.
Once ready for shipping, the process of getting each package to the correct truck relies on two other robots. As packages flow along a conveyor belt, an automated arm named Robin lifts up/scans packages one at a time and sets them down on a mobile robot called Pegasus. Each wheeled Pegasus robot then carries the package to a conveyor that will bring the package to the correct truck bay.
MOSIMTEC has supported Walmart in their automation journey. Walmart piloted a robotic system at a supercenter store in Salem, NH for online grocery pickup. Alphabot, made by Alert Innovation, automated process steps by using autonomous mobile carts to gather shelf-stable, refrigerated and frozen items from a high-density storage system. Robotic carts retrieved/delivered items to store associates to quickly fulfill online orders, out of customer view.
MOSIMTEC simulated Alphabot in the design phase, including a combination of robots, racking systems, picking workstations and control software to understand technology feasibility in multiple customer demand situations and store profiles, and assist Walmart in making an investment decision. Modeling provides rich insight by gauging probability of success and quantifying risk. Simulations indicated 95% of orders could get picked in <8 minutes, with an average pick time of 3-4 minutes. Walmart purchased Alert Innovation in 2022. MOSIMTEC can help you automate/future-proof your business.
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