Amazon’s Quest for the ‘Holy Grail’ of Robotics
I spent a number of years working on software at Amazon in the Picking and storage space. This truly is the Holy Grail in the sense that I&#x27;m not actually sure what they want is possible&#x2F;real.<p>There is a trade-off between storage density and ease of picking. This is true for humans as well as robots. An example: Open a drawer in your kitchen. If it&#x27;s full as possible in an unorganized fashion, you&#x27;ll often struggle to even locate the item you&#x27;re looking for. And once you find it, you need to carefully move other items around to get it out.<p>Now, empty that drawer and put back 1&#x2F;3 of the items, carefully organized. Now you can find and grab anything quickly! Even a robot could! ... But you need 3 times as many drawers in your kitchen.<p>Your messy kitchen drawer is a pretty close parallel to a typical Amazon storage bin.<p>Set aside the question of robot speed (they&#x27;re slow), the real question is how much less storage density is needed for the robot to function. Giving up storage density means a smaller selection in each warehouse, which increases shipping costs- the item you want isn&#x27;t as near to you anymore- or it demands a lot more warehouses, which are expensive to build and operate.<p>Shipping costs dominate their overall cost to get you what you ordered. Fully automating picking at the cost of reduced storage density is a net loss.