Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans
258 comments
·May 9, 2025ge96
throwaway314155
> I started drinking to get through it on my breaks
That bad, huh?
ge96
It just made it more fun. There was a liquor store nearby so drive to it on the 30 minute break, pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles (99 Apples), back to it. That job was more fun than stow.
If you're curious can read the subreddit /r/amazonfc
They did recently start allowing you to buy their own approved headphones but before you'd get written up for being on your phone/having headphones in
lr1970
> pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles, back to it. That job was more fun than stow.
WoW, you can hold your liquor :-)
thisisnotauser
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
dan-robertson
Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering that bad thing (though automation won’t always decrease this, eg see rise in number of bank tellers/branches in the US). But that isn’t really the way that lots of people talk about jobs and so if what you want is for people to have somewhere local where they can exchange their time for money to spend on goods and services then I guess automation and efficiency don’t really matter because the point of the job is to ensure the worker has money coming in rather than to ensure that something useful comes out of it. That latter point of view is pretty popular and I think I’m describing it pretty terribly – I’m sure there is a much more reasonable argument for it.
tw04
The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
SR2Z
> You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.
[citation needed]
We've been at it for more than a century now and it seems to be working pretty well for nearly everyone!
Our goal is not to preserve jobs. Our goal is to be more productive for fewer resources.
Jobs in Detroit went away - but so did the people, who found new jobs in other cities. There has been no lasting unemployment from automation, ever.
Human beings are good for more than pulling levers and carrying heavy objects and we do each other a disservice by pretending otherwise.
jajuuka
Detroit is an odd example. You have the cornerstone industry up and leaving the area, followed by race riots which led to white flight and the middle class leaving the city. This led to a vacuum in support and jobs leaving the new majority black population and poor to fend for themselves. Two historically oppressed groups now yolked to a dying city.
It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
sydbarrett74
Judging from efforts in the US to make health care harder and harder to obtain, I'm betting on the former, especially if other countries follow suit. Slowly letting people die from untreated chronic diseases may be seen as more humane than outright mass slaughter.
guhidalg
I think the latter view is usually held by people who know they won't experience productivity gains from automation.
Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don't want it.
Personally, I think those people can't be picky about their jobs. If you do something that is automatable, you will be out of a job sooner or later. When that happens, don't get mad and go find another soon-to-be automated job.
myself248
Pray tell, what jobs can't be automated soon?
8note
meanwhile, i wont mind if they trash your robot taxi so that its inoperable. shoulda put that money and automation into something that doesnt break so easily
arghwhat
The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation.
Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.
(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)
allturtles
I think the point is that once robots can do everything human bodies do and AIs can do everything human minds do, there is nowhere left for humans to go. Just like horses didn't find new employment when internal combustion engines reached the point where they could do everything a horse does but better and cheaper.
arghwhat
I think the horses were pretty okay with not being bred into slavery.
But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.
Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...
exe34
Poor people will go the way of the horse.
opo
>Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars.
Amazing how that bit of PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
cryptonector
As long as the pace of automation does not exceed some max rate that people can't figure out what to do with the excess labor, we should be ok.
Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.
Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".
Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.
disambiguation
Once Bezos replaces everyone with robots, why would he need anyone to buy his junk anymore?
vlovich123
Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.
vishalontheline
Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?
burnerthrow008
No, Henry Ford's goal was to screw the Dodge brothers (whose other company, Dodge Brothers Company, needed a cash injection), not to help his workers.
The Dodge brothers were major investors in Ford Motor Company, and thus entitled to a large share of dividends. Henry Ford tried to bankrupt the Dodge Motor Company by avoiding to pay FoMoCo dividends and thus starve his competitor of cash. The fact that the mechanism Ford used to make his own company unprofitable (and thus avoid paying dividends) also benefited the workers is just coincidence.
In fact the reason we have the modern precedent "companies must operate for the benefit of shareholders" is precisely because Henry Ford's defense in Dodge v. Ford was "I can do this because I want to and I am king". If he had argued "paying workers more makes them happier and thus makes Ford more profitable in the long term", Ford probably would have won that lawsuit. He didn't make that argument because it just wasn't on his radar: His goal was screwing Dodge.
AndrewKemendo
Kind of but it was moreso that he wanted to invest in expansion and R&D while driving prices down for consumers
See: Dodge vs Ford
hashiyakshmi
That may be true, but it certainly helped that he DID pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they were making.
claudiulodro
It might be apocryphal, but my understanding is that he did this less out of a sense of civic duty and more because the skilled tradespeople liked their existing lifestyle and did not want to work in factories much, so they needed a big raise to be convinced.
vinceguidry
Not enough to offset losing their fingers left and right.
kajumix
Once he replaces everyone with robots, and all the factories do the same, people will get stuff at home for watching ads.
iamtheworstdev
but ads exist to convince people to buy things. if people can't afford to buy things, why would you need ads?
hattmall
Products will become advertisements themselves. It could be cheaper and more effective to send everyone a box of Tesla Tasty-Electrons cereal than TV or Social media and slots.
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
kajumix
you may not need to buy a box of cereal or a vacuum cleaner, but maybe a flight to moon, or a humanoid companion? products move up a level
mrweasel
Maybe we pay people a small fee to watch ads?
entropicdrifter
So they can buy things with their ad-watching money.
MangoCoffee
New types of jobs are created every year. When I was young, there was no such thing as streaming video games and getting paid for it. Now, young kids and adults are making bank by playing video games and letting the whole world watch
pixelready
I’m all for creative disruption, but what worries me is when I see a pattern of stable employment being displaced by algorithmically mediated gig work and viral entertainer lotto tickets. This is a dangerous trend in general, but the US is especially poorly positioned because of its lack of strong safety nets. When the foundation of your economy is hollowed out to make it ever more top-heavy, you’re destined for collapse.
philipwhiuk
It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse.
The later is a much easier problem.
vidarh
The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy:
throw310822
Incredibile!
Also, from the comments:
"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
CamperBob2
Meanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars.
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
RaSoJo
Ocado did run into multiple fire issues due to these robots colliding with each other. In 2019 and 2021 [1]
Wonder if the matter has been resolved.
havblue
I'd suggest robots with fire extinguishers.
kevin_thibedeau
I'm curious how Amazon handles fire in the midst of their Kiva pods. Do they have procedures for retasking an army of robots to clear a path for humans to get access?
tombert
Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.
yurishimo
I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations.
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
burningChrome
Back in the early aughts when I was still in college, My roommate was an IE and worked as an efficiency engineer intern during his Summers. I vividly remember him talking about the company he was working for had a huge project to improve UPS's efficiencies. Their big improvements was to add dozens and dozens of conveyor belts in order to move the packages faster. He concluded his experience by saying, "Yeah man, its crazy, this is what the future is going to look like. This is how they're going to automate everything."
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
Closi
Not sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history!
They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
gjm11
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indicates that shortly after the UK judgement they settled on terms very favourable to Ocado.)
This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
Closi
AutoStore losing a patent dispute doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them. Just looking at the patent dispute ignores that the first automated Ocado distribution centre was actually purchased from AutoStore, who had been selling their robot-digging tote system since 1996.
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
omneity
> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore".
I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.
Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
gamblor956
AutoStore's patents were deemed invalid in the U.K. because they disclosed the invention prior to filing for the patents, which apparently is not allowed under U.K. law.
Their patents were invalidated in the U.S. due to "inequitable conduct or equitable estoppel" meaning either that Autostore violated someone else's patents or that they led Ocado to believe that Ocado was not violating Autostore's patents in some way. Both parties indicate that the latter happened, but the usual remedy is just a mandatory license, so the invalidation of the patents indicates that the former also occurred. (https://www.autostoresystem.com/investors-press-releases/aut...)
voakbasda
Truth has no place in a court of law. The fact that they won the lawsuit does not imply they are innocent. It could simply mean that they had better lawyers.
michaelt
The warehouse automation industry has long had problems with scaling systems up.
A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.
That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.
It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.
Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
mmmlinux
Yeah but then you cant pretend like your going to hire a bunch of humans in the local poor area that you built the warehouse.
alsodumb
It takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.
jajuuka
Labor is one of the most expensive parts of running a business. So just doing the math of, if we spend X amount of money on robots and can layoff Y amount of people then it's a net gain. Especially if a single machine can replace multiple people.
sschueller
Humans are cheaper than robots too...
bluGill
Only sometimes and costs change over time. The first robot is almost always more expensive than a human, but the second robot comes after the design is done and so it generally cheaper than the human (accountants will figure out how to amortize these costs and thus give us a better picture of costs.)
Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
thfuran
How much cheaper? You can hardly get humans to work two shifts a day, let alone three.
CamperBob2
In China, yes, but not here.
null
abricot
Only if you don't need to pay them a living wage.
AIoverlord
I just watched a video of theirs and i have no clue at all if this is more efficient or not.
Amazon uses a lot higher stacked spaces than Ocado does.
Are there any real numbers you can reference than just stating that Ocados way is better?
philipwhiuk
I didn't say it was better, I said it was easier to design robots that don't have to work in an environment originally designed for humans.
beambot
Symbotic also has a fascinating solution.
kylehotchkiss
Does this have any potential to get costs down for customers though?
rsyring
Costs are fine IMO.
I'd rather see quality improve, even at a reasonable cost increase, and the disappearance of the alphabet soup brands and similar.
omneity
Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear.
The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
esperent
I guess a spatula is a kind of blade. I was expecting something a little more exciting though, from your comment.
raisedbyninjas
It appears this bot could be about 100 times simpler if they just had storage racks with smaller cubbies at the modest expense of usable storage volume. 1 item per cubbie.
rahimnathwani
That would be a huge expense. You would either waste a lot of space in each one, or have the robot waste time finding one that's the optimal size.
LightBug1
It's a safe space in the interim. A place where they can hone their skills and sharpen their blades.
djtango
How does the robot assess whether there is enough space available in each bin?
abricot
It also stowed the other items, and know how much space they take up.
From the article:
> “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”
spwa4
It reads the state from a database?
immibis
This feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?
kevin_thibedeau
The Kiva warehouses deliver the pods to human pickers at fixed stations. The humans just have to retrieve the product from the indicated bin without roaming the warehouse. The storage area for the pods is kept maximally packed without any aisles since the robots have their grid to operate in underneath.
withinboredom
From working on warehouse picking software way before there were robots ... it's because humans. It would take longer for a human to find space in the right space -- or instead, be lazy and forcibly put an item in a space it barely fits -- than to simply dump it into an arbitrary box with enough space and record the box. Then when deciding the path for the picker to pick items from, there's a high chance one of the purchased items is actually nearby other purchased items.
krapp
That's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are far too neat.
bluGill
Neat is very important for consistent performance.
A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV)
A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day.
I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.
zaphar
Slow is fast is a saying for a reason. It is just as true for a human as it is for a robot.
usrusr
It's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost.
If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.
bluGill
What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.
CraigRood
Part of my day job is Warehouse Automation - not Amazon!. I would agree with you on being slow, but it probably suffices to what Amazon want to achieve here. If your entire process, so stow, store and retrieve is automated, you wouldn't use these "pods". A lot of these problems seem so simple and easy to automate out, but it's really not!
WillAdams
Yeah, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse on two separate occasions:
https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
and Inbound (or the previous person picking) was usually a bit less careful.
wielebny
Slower than a human making one operation.
Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
dataviz1000
The tortoise and hare allegory? Slow and steady wins the race.
vntok
Surely the robot does not stop at the end of the day.
dlt713705
The challenge is not only stowing objects. It is also optimizing space and keeping it clean. In that matter robots are faster and better.
krapp
Optimizing space and trying to keep things neat is a futile effort. Pickers and counters are constantly pulling things out of the bins and putting them back in, and during high demand it's a chaotic mess. If there are going to be robots being this meticulous at every step of the process, then it's too slow.
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
damion6
Great they can stop killing people. Only place I ever worked where the ambulances came 1-5 times a day to save the old people they abuse
mapt
This seems insane. We're trying to teach Longshoreman's Tetris to machines, instead of using the system of standard containerization that almost completely replaced longshoremen, despite lower packing densities.
Dylan16807
If Amazon had to load and unload entire warehouses as fast as possible, they wouldn't do this. The constraints they're operating under are completely different.
dialup_sounds
The containerization is at a higher level: the rack of yellow bins is a four-sided tower that is robotically driven in and out of tightly packed uniform rows.
dylan604
Right. Containers being a standard size is great so you don't have to care about what's inside the containers. At the AMZN warehouse, they absolutely care about what's in the containers, and what's in the container is no longer anywhere close to be standard size/shape/weight.
mapt
The container is the standardization. One container per unit of product. Containers ("bins") dimensioned in multiples of some standard unit that evenly divides a grid system on a rack. Stuffing looks like "a pallet of identical goods appears on one side of your workspace and 150 individual 100mm x 200mm x 400mm bins appear on the other side and the job is to put A into B". Storage operations look like they do now using the robot racks. Emptying looks like "Three bins of various sizes shows up on one side and a cardboard box appears on the other side". You divide the tasks up and have a different machine or human for each. The benefit is you always have a reliably identical picking and stuffing task per item, and there is never a bin of remainder items that has to be pushed back into the system. The cost is lowered storage efficiency. You don't even have to break a pallet at a DC, you can design for distribution of bins (at a higher transport cost).
greekanalyst
It's clear we are near an event horizon moment.
londons_explore
> 500,000 stows in operational warehouses
Isn't that a pretty tiny number?
I assume a human probably does 1 every 5 seconds (it's much easier to put an item on a shelf than to take it off).
So that's about 5 months human output.
voidUpdate
What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean? Surely there have been robots in the past that can detect how much force they are apply to an object? Was that a "fake sense of touch"?
Symmetry
I'd assume measuring the force exerted at the contact point rather than the motor current.
markisus
I think this has also existed in the form of force sensors and more recently image-like pressure sensors.
Symmetry
Right. A company I used to work for was selling force sensors over a decade ago and I'm sure they're older than that.
https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/65024/TakkTile-Sensors-for-Indu...
bearjaws
"a genuine sense of touch" Means the stock is down $30 YTD and they gotta pump by pretending they've created something.
aaron695
[dead]
blitzar
> What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean?
The technology has applications in the robot sex work industry.
matthewfelgate
Are companies designing product packaging to be more compatible with robotic handling?
AftHurrahWinch
Anecdotally, I know of 2 examples of friends who work in traditional manufacturing who have changed packaging graphics and colors because their previous designs were difficult for optics.
Specifically, both of them had to stop using black-colored boxes and move graphics in from box boundaries.
m3kw9
This is good news actually, while you have less jobs, hopefully new ones are created, people in the future don't have the option to work slave like jobs.
gruntbuggly
I see this thinking thrown around often, but I don't see how net new jobs would be created by efficiencies. Amazon wouldn't adopt robots if it created more employment overhead downstream. Sure, there will be robot maintainers, but not at a replacement level of the roles replaced. Companies adopt technologies because they reduce the net amount of human input (cost) required, right?
marcellus23
Well, the industrial revolution has been a story of continuous efficiency gains and increasing automation, but somehow there's still enough jobs.
gruntbuggly
Certainly, for 95% of americans that's been true recently, but ai seems more positioned as a qualitative than a quantitative shift. maybe my defining it in terms of efficiency is incorrect. Moreover these types of mundane tasks are a product of that industrialization. so i'm puzzled by the thinking of 'more efficiency to fix the pains brought on by efficiencies'
throwawaymb
[flagged]
I worked as stow, that job is brutal man, you gotta last 2-3 hrs at a time 3x a day for a 10hr shift. They don't like you listening to music so you gotta just sit there in silence. Luckily I got to unload trucks and I started drinking to get through it on my breaks.
Still it's tough to beat a place where you can walk in with no skills and start making $20/hr