Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 18.80
June 26, 2020
Amazon Acquires Zoox Amazon has taken its boldest step yet into self-driving vehicles, acquiring six-year-old start-up Zoox, the company announced today. Amazon said the deal will help bring Zoox’s “vision of autonomous ride-hailing to reality.” Zoox will continue to operate as a standalone business within Amazon, with CEO Aicha Evans and Jesse Levinson, the company’s co-founder and CTO, continuing to lead the team, Amazon said. “Zoox is working to imagine, invent, and design a world-class autonomous ride-hailing experience,” said Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO, Worldwide Consumer. “Like Amazon, Zoox is passionate about innovation and about its customers, and we're excited to…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 5.84
May 22, 2020
…he recalled. Around that time, Kiva was acquired by Amazon. That acquisition validated the business opportunity for both roboticists like Galluzzo and the venture capitalists that were funding them. IAM Robotics raised $3 million in angel funding. Initially, Galluzzo says, IAM Robotics was going to focus on modular, low-cost robotic arms, but Galluzzo had a connection at Rochester Drug Cooperative, where he saw an application for an autonomous mobile, piece-picking robot that could go up and down aisles and pick from a shelf to a tote without human intervention. “We decided to go after it,” he recalls. He says that…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 6.59
May 11, 2020
…hyperscale infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and IBM; cloud-based collaboration and application providers; telecom operators providing cloud services; cloud connectivity partners; and colocation data centers. The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted several examples of processes that can be digitized and virtualized,” Bicknell continues. “Google has told job seekers it will conduct all interviews virtually via Google Hangouts for the foreseeable future. Corporate video conferencing is enabling both legal and medical case discussions, while telemedicine is being used to provide COVID-19 remote diagnosis and treatment. “The necessary wider move to cloud will now pose questions…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 6.16
May 01, 2020
…materials, the build of materials for the Maker Mask is now included on the list of essential materials on Amazon.com. During the past month, the Maker Mask Initiative has received more than $100,000 in donations to help offset the costs of mask-making materials and to further develop the platform. To make a donation, visit https://www.makermask.com/donate.html.
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 5.26
April 07, 2020
…grocery and food delivery are up more than 40%, Amazon is up more than 16%, grocers are up almost 12%, and general merchandisers are up about 8% while over that same period apparel and department store sales are down over 10%. Consumers have radically changed their buying patterns and the impacts are significant across the retail ecosystem. Some current trends are expected to reverse over time, but some, especially consumer appetite for e-commerce, will not. Regardless of which situation a retailer finds themselves in short term, up or down, robotic automation delivers the competitive advantage, enhanced asset utilization, and labor…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 3.63
March 04, 2020
…future - for many businesses, it’s the present. While Amazon has been the front-runner in this field, they have kept most of their advances to themselves. Thankfully, numerous companies have stepped into the breach to develop similar autonomous robots and other automated systems, which shepherd pallets and individual items around the warehouse. The advantages of automation are numerous. Autonomous vehicles and robots can be more reactive, as they receive an order from a WMS and immediately know where to go to carry it out. They also present safety benefits, as they can support heavy loads and pose no risk of…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 9.85
March 03, 2020
…and retail distribution as part of Kiva Systems and Amazon Robotics. His experience with these companies includes the largest swarm deployment in the industry, comprising 1,700 robots and robotic elevators, for which he shares patents. “RightHand has been assessing market opportunities and meeting with prospects and potential partners in Europe for several years now,” stated Schechter. “Many European firms already manage their inventory using tote systems that are ready to automate with RightPick, our piece-picking solution. We are very excited to officially expand our operations to better support our current customers and partners there, and I welcome any additional prospects…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 3.63
March 03, 2020
The march of e-commerce now has Amazon advertising two-hour food deliveries in select cities. In this environment, more shippers face pressure to deliver goods at a faster pace, all while keeping costs under control. To cope, many organizations are pinning their hopes on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). But when will these “emerging” technologies form practical applications that solve logistics pain points? To find out how these emerging technologies are evolving into logistics relevance, we talked to top consultants and analysts. We found that AI is already being…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 23.74
March 02, 2020
Here’s a fact for you: At present, Amazon employs more than 400,000 full and part-time associates worldwide across a network of 110 North American and another 75 around the globe. So, given that the shortage of logistics workers is a top topic at every industry event I attend, just what is Amazon doing to win the war on talent, given the scale of its operations. That’s a question I posed to spokesperson Todd Walker at the end of our recent tour of Amazon’s highly-automated robotic fulfillment center in North Haven, Connecticut. The short answer is that Amazon is investing in…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 11.39
March 02, 2020
Amazon Robotic Fulfillment Center, North Haven, Connecticut Opened: June 2019 (watch video) Size: 855,000 square feet Dock Doors: 62 SKUs: 1 million + Throughput: 1 million + orders per day during peak Shifts: 2 10-hour shifts per day, with downtime for maintenance between shifts Employees: 2,500 full-time associates, each working 4 shifts per week Primary Material Handling Equipment: Goods-to-person picking on a four-level pick module enabled by Amazon Robotics; ten miles of conveyor and sortation; cubing and weighing, automatic labeling, spiral conveyors and trailer-loading conveyor Area of Coverage: The facility’s primary role is the fulfillment of Prime orders in southern…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 6.49
March 01, 2020
…want to work with strict military or government clients. Amazon, one of the biggest cloud service providers, launched GovCloud in late 2011, creating a way for SaaS vendors to comply with the regulations. “AWS GovCloud is a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements,” writes Amazon. AWS data centers running the AWS GovCloud services are located in geographic regions acceptable to government and military users, both for compliance and security reasons. The stringent requirements go both ways. To use the…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 2.77
March 01, 2020
…firms are more comfortable using public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and others. Most software providers that offer cloud options also typically provide some flexibility for customers who either won’t or can’t (due to regulatory requirements) move to a fully public cloud infrastructure. According to Stucker, early adopters in the cloud space have focused on private clouds, but that is slowly shifting to public cloud infrastructures. “These installed cloud architectures can become obsolete quickly,” Stucker says. “Leasing compute power makes more sense for companies than buying hardware and hiring a team to manage it.”…
