68 The Economist February 12th 2022
Science & technology
Logistics(1)The bots taking over the warehouse
A
decade agoAmazon started to intro
duce robots into its “fulfilment cen
tres”, as online retailers call their giant dis
tribution warehouses. Instead of having
people wandering up and down rows of
shelves picking goods to complete orders,
the machines would lift and then carry the
shelves to the pickers. That saved time and
money. Amazon’s sites now have more
than 350,000 robots of various sorts de
ployed worldwide. But even that is not
enough to secure its future.
Advances in warehouse robotics, cou
pled with increasing labour costs and diffi
culty in finding workers, have created a
watershed moment in the logistics indus
try. With covid19 lockdowns causing sup
plychain disruptions and a boom in home
deliveries that is likely to endure, fulfil
ment centres have been working at full tilt.
Despite the robots, many firms have to
bring in temporary workers to cope with
increased demand during busy periods.
Competition for staff is fierce. In the run
up to the holiday shopping season in De
cember, Amazon brought in some 150,000extra workers in America alone, offering
signon bonuses of up to $3,000.
The longterm implications of such a
high reliance on increasingly hardtofind
labour in distribution is clear, according to
a new study by McKinsey, a consultancy:
“Automation in warehousing is no longer
just nice to have but an imperative for sus
tainable growth.”
This means more robots are needed, in
cluding newer, more efficient versions to
replace those already at work and ad
vanced machines to take over most of the
remaining jobs done by humans. As a re
sult, McKinsey forecasts the warehouse
automation market will grow at a com
pound annual rate of 23% to be worth more
than $50bn by 2030.The new robots are coming. One of
them is the prototype 600 Series bot. This
machine “changes everything” according
to Tim Steiner, chief executive of Ocado
Group, which began in 2002 as an online
British grocer and has evolved over the
years into one of the leading providers of
warehouse robotics.
The 600 Series is a strangelooking
beast, much like a box on wheels made out
of skeletal parts. That is because more than
half its components are 3dprinted. As 3d-
printing builds things up layer by layer it
allows the shapes to be optimised, thus us
ing the least amount of material. As a re
sult, the 600 Series is five times lighter
than the company’s present generation of
bots, which makes it more agile and less
demanding on battery power.March of the machines
Ocado’s bots work in what is known as the
“Hive”, a giant metallic grid at the centre of
its fulfilment centres. Some of these Hives
are bigger than a football pitch.
Each cell on the grid contains products
stored in plastic crates, stacked 21 deep. As
orders arrive, a bot is dispatched to extract
a crate and transport it to a picking station,
where a human worker takes all the items
they need, scans each one and puts them
into a bag, much as happens at a supermar
ket checkout.
It could take an hour or so walking
around a warehouse to collect each item
manually for a large order. But as hundredsDistribution centres are becoming increasingly automated with a new
generation of smarter, faster robots→Alsointhissection
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