Amazon Uses 45,000 Robots, up 50pct Year on Year

[engine]

Amazon is using 45,000 robots in its fulfilment centres, and that's up 50% from this time last year.
Clearly, robotics in warehousing is the way forward for the larger ecommerce businesses.
It only goes towards the change in human jobs and adapting to maintain the robots, rather than picking the goods.

The world’s largest e-commerce retailer said it employed 45,000 robots in some 20 fulfilment centers. That’s a cool 50 percent increase from last year’s holiday season, when the company had some 30,000 robots working alongside 230,000 humans. Amazon Uses 45,000 Robots, up 50pct Year on Year [seattletimes.com]

[LifeinAsia]

Interesting. Back in 1995 when I first heard a talk about doing commerce through this new Internet thingee (not sure if the term "e-commerce" was used), the speaker described how every step along the entire process (from user selecting an item to placing the item on the delivery truck) would not require any human intervention.

At the time, I thought that moving inventory from shelf to truck would have been one of the easier aspects to automate. I'm guessing that if all the products have a fairly standard size/shape it should be. But Amazon's huge diversity of items probably complicates things quite a bit more.

I can't remember if the speaker talked about automating the delivery segment- probably too much like science fiction at the time. :)