Amazon
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Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer, and Earth’s safest place to work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon.
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Amazon partners with Unbound Potential to pilot battery technology at logistics hub
Amazon has partnered with Unbound Potential, a Swiss battery startup, to trial its battery energy storage (BESS) technology in a pilot project at Amazon’s European logistics centers. Amazon aims to use the battery to support the challenge of limited solar energy utilization due to 24/7 operations, enabling the transition to off-grid fulfillment centers powered entirely by renewable sources.
During the pilot phase, Amazon will work closely with the startup, providing feedback, troubleshooting assistance, and opportunities to refine their technologies to ensure they work smoothly in their placements.
Upon completion, environmental impacts, financial viability, and overall effectiveness of the pilot will be assessed to determine whether it can be scaled across other sites as part of a long-term partnership.
Amazon Invests in X-energy to Support Advanced Small Modular Nuclear Reactors and Expand Carbon-Free Power
X-Energy Reactor Company, LLC (“X-energy”), a leader in advanced nuclear reactor and fuel technology, announced a Series C-1 financing round of approximately $500 million, anchored by Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”). The investment will help meet growing energy demands by funding the completion of X-energy’s reactor design and licensing as well as the first phase of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Additionally, the funding will support future carbon-free projects that will use X-energy’s Xe-100 advanced small modular nuclear reactors (“SMRs”). Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin, affiliates of Ares Management Corporation (“Ares”), NGP, and the University of Michigan join Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund in the financing round.
Amazon and X-energy are also collaborating to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new power projects online across the United States by 2039, representing the largest commercial deployment target of SMRs to date. The efforts will help meet growing energy demands in key locations through direct project investments and long-term power purchase agreements to help power Amazon operations. Further, X-energy and Amazon plan to establish and standardize a deployment and financing model to develop projects in partnership with infrastructure and utility partners.
The companies will initially support a four-unit 320-megawatt (“MW”) project with regional utility Energy Northwest in central Washington with the option to increase that project to 12 units and 960 MW. Amazon is immediately committing a direct investment in the Energy Northwest project to fund early development work that X-energy will perform.
Inside Amazon’s massive robot rollout: A grand labor experiment with so much at stake
The Mt. Juliet warehouse, the 11th generation of Amazon fulfillment centers, isn’t even the newest. Amazon’s first 12th generation facility, called SHV1 and located in Shreveport, Louisiana, debuted just this month. It features Amazon’s first implementation of eight different robot systems collaborating inside the same building.
One multilevel monstrosity in Shreveport, called Sequoia, can store 30 million products, and instantly retrieve items from this massive stockpile thanks to thousands of mobile robots within it. Sparrow, an AI-powered robotic arm also inside SHV1, can replace human hands just fine when it comes to grasping and manipulating a selection of 200 million different goods.
What began inside Amazon with the acquisition of the robotics startup Kiva in 2012, has already developed into the “the largest collaborative robotics deployment in the world,” Madan added. Currently, more than 75% of all Amazon customer orders originate in a facility powered by its robots. Along the way, Amazon has quietly transformed itself into the “world’s largest manufacturer and operator of industrial robotics,” according to the executive.
While the business case for increased automation replacing some human labor is clear – expectations like 25% quicker order processing, a 25% reduction in “the cost to serve” customers, and of course no personal problems or bad days to contend with as an employer – Amazon is also promising that safer worker conditions are a goal and, they say, already happening. Amazon said injuries at its robotic warehouses were 8.5% lower in 2023 than at its non-automated facilities.
The Foundational Industries of our American economy have been neglected, sacrificed, and nearly forgotten for decades
Historically, casting and machining, trucking and shipping, and process and discrete assembly have been at the core of manufacturing, and the US has lagged behind our peers for over two decades. But now, a new wave of innovators is poised to revitalize the industrial sector. Tech entrepreneurs are turning their attention to these massive spaces and they are experts at applying automation, cloud hosted software, and advanced technologies. These founders have lived the disruptions in the IT space by leveraging cloud infrastructure, mobile platforms, machine learning, and process automation. The application of this knowledge to the industrial sector puts us in the unique position to not only catch up but to once again jump ahead of other countries in these industries and to do so faster than we have in other spaces. Companies like Copia, Telegraph, and H2Ok Innovation are already demonstrating how much progress can be made by applying cloud, developer workflows and automation — relatively ubiquitous technology within the IT world — to the industrial world.
The vast data collected in logistics and manufacturing systems create a fertile ground for new generative AI capabilities to co-pilot, design, or run new processes in the industrial world. This could no doubt be how we leapfrog other nations with huge productivity gains. We can now harness the vast amounts of data that has been sitting in disconnected, local machines and disperate spreadsheets and use the combined learnings to transform areas like supply chain, procurement, chip design: companies such as Advex, Didero, and Sphere are already doing this. When you start using software systems and reinforcement learning instead of people to run factories and production, operational uptime and efficiency compound to quickly surpass the most productive and largest offshore factories, which simply have three people-driven shifts around the clock. Companies like Hadrian, Chef, and Atomic Machines are showing these automation capabilities and producing strong returns on investments in physical, onshore factories.
Even if you were to assume that the tech-first industrials companies’ growth slows to that of the larger tech indices (11-12%) through 2050, and the rest of the S&P continues to expand as it has historically, the market cap of the Industrials Sector could grow from a mere $3.7T to $55T in 2050. Industrials would make up 29% of the S&P 500 (from 8% currently). If we can continue this trend and support the best tech entrepreneurs as they turn their attention to the industrials space, we can completely reshape our public market by 2050 — and reach further into jobs growth, boost the GDP, and create outsized production in the U.S.
3Laws Secures $4.1M in Seed Funding to Enable Safe Unsupervised Robot Operation in Dynamic Environments
3Laws, a leader in dynamic safety solutions for autonomous systems, has secured $4.1M in seed funding. The round is led by TenOneTen, with participation from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. All pre-seed investors have chosen to maintain or increase their ownership in this round.
3Laws’ technology was originally developed at Caltech, driven by over a decade of research and development in robotics, control theory, and computer vision. This development effort was supported and facilitated by deep collaborations with industry leaders. The technology was deployed with these partners in a variety of hardware and operational settings, including drones, articulated robot arms, quadrupeds, and ground vehicles.
Now, 3Laws has developed dynamic safety software that can be deployed universally on any autonomous system utilizing existing sensors. The company’s core product, Supervisor, is flexible, scalable, and can integrate into existing autonomy stacks without requiring modifications to the underlying structure. Supervisor monitors signals from the existing autonomy software and modulates them, where necessary, to ensure dynamic safety in a deterministic and describable fashion. For development engineers, Supervisor removes corner cases and shortens development time. For operations managers, Supervisor ensures greater efficiency, improved reliability, and reduced risks. The end result is a system users can trust and deploy confidently.
Amazon acquihiring and licensing Covariant’s robotic foundation models
Through our agreement, Amazon is receiving a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s robotic foundation models. Covariant’s models will help drive new ways to generalize how our robotic systems learn and provide dynamic opportunities for how we use automation to make our operations safer and better deliver for customers. As part of this effort, Amazon plans to grow its AI and robotics team in the Bay Area to tap into world class talent and advance the latest in automation.
Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and a group of research scientists and engineers (around a quarter of Covariant’s current employees) will join Amazon’s Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics Team to help drive the development and implementation of Covariant’s technology within Amazon’s operations and continue to develop innovative AI solutions. Covariant will continue to serve its dozens of customers and build on Covariant’s technology that supports fulfillment and distribution center automation.
Swiss-Mile secures over €19.8 million in seed funding, co-led by Jeff Bezos and HongShan
Swiss-Mile, a pioneering company connecting AI with the physical world using autonomous machines, announced the successful closure of over €19.8 million seed funding round. This round was notably co-led by Jeff Bezos, through Bezos Expeditions, and HongShan, with additional participation from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Armada Investment. The round also saw continued support from existing investor Linear Capital, underscoring the strong belief in Swiss-Mile’s vision and potential.
Swiss-Mile is a spin-off from the renowned Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich and has been at the forefront of integrating artificial neural networks into robots with both legs and wheels. The company’s technology allows robots to walk, drive, stand upright on two legs, and manipulate objects with wheeled end effectors. This versatility is key to addressing real-world challenges in both mobility and manipulation, positioning Swiss-Mile as a leader in the next wave of robotic automation.
Standard Bots Secures $63M in Funding to Propel American Manufacturing Forward with AI-Driven Robotics
Standard Bots, a pioneer in robotics automation, announced it has raised $63 million in total funding, with its recent Series B round led by General Catalyst with participation from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next. The company has already successfully launched its RO1 robotic arm and is now preparing to bring its new AI-powered robots to market, unlocking use cases and industries untouched by traditional robotics, such as complex assembly, food preparation, or dishwashing.
Standard Bots designs and assembles collaborative robotic arms in the United States to transform industrial sectors such as manufacturing. The company is also developing a transformer-based model that leverages the power of AI to enhance robotic capabilities. By observing human demonstrations, Standard Bots empowers robots to master intricate tasks from loading complex welding fixtures to folding clothing with unprecedented precision, marking a pivotal moment in the industry and unlocking a realm of new possibilities previously deemed by many to be beyond robotic reach. Standard Bots’ RO1 and RO2 robotic arms are currently in production and are designed for high variability and challenging real-world applications, a stark contrast to traditional, pre-programmed robots that often cannot navigate unpredictable conditions such as dynamic or cluttered environments and unexpected obstacles.
Archetype AI Introduces Foundation Model to Pioneer Physical AI
Archetype AI, a physical AI company helping humanity make sense of the world, announced its emergence from stealth and the introduction of Newton™, a first-of-its-kind foundation model that understands the physical world. With Newton, Archetype AI is on a mission to use the power of artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems – empowering people and organizations with an understanding of the physical environment that wasn’t previously possible.
In support of this mission, Archetype AI has raised a $13 million seed funding round led by Venrock, with participation from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Hitachi Ventures, Buckley Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and several angel investors. In conjunction with the financing, Ganesh Srinivasan, Partner at Venrock, will join the board.
With Newton, Archetype AI is introducing a first-of-its-kind physical AI foundational model that is capable of perceiving, understanding and reasoning about the world. Newton fuses multimodal temporal data – including signals from accelerometers, gyroscopes, radars, cameras, microphones, thermometers and other environmental sensors – with natural language to unlock insights about the physical world in real-time.
Glacier Raises Another $7.7M from New Enterprise Associates and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund to Bring AI-Powered Robots to More Recycling Centers
Glacier, an AI and robotics company helping the recycling industry create a world without waste, announced it has raised $7.7 million in funding from NEA and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, with additional participation by notable investors including AlleyCorp, Overture Climate VC, and VSC Ventures.
Glacier will allocate a significant portion of the funding towards team expansion and developing its low-cost, high-performance AI-enabled robots, which streamline recyclable sorting while gathering real-time data on recycling streams for businesses. Additionally, Glacier intends to utilize the funding to bolster its recycling capabilities, particularly in light of its recent collaboration with Amazon. This partnership is geared towards enhancing traceability and recovery processes for recyclable materials.
Amazon to invest in start-ups that combine AI with robotics
Amazon’s $1bn industrial innovation fund is to step up investments in companies that combine artificial intelligence and robotics, as the ecommerce giant seeks to drive efficiencies across its logistics network. The industrial innovation fund is seeking to invest in start-ups that can support the ecommerce group’s aims of becoming “more efficient, safer for our associates, and increase the speed of delivery to our customers”, Bossart said.
Amazon has innovated in robotics before: in 2022, the company said it had invested more than €400mn in technologies that include industrial robotics and sorting systems in its European warehouses. It has deployed 750,000 mobile robots across its operations network.
New AI model could streamline operations in a robotic warehouse
Getting 800 robots to and from their destinations efficiently while keeping them from crashing into each other is no easy task. It is such a complex problem that even the best path-finding algorithms struggle to keep up with the breakneck pace of e-commerce or manufacturing.
The researchers built a deep-learning model that encodes important information about the warehouse, including the robots, planned paths, tasks, and obstacles, and uses it to predict the best areas of the warehouse to decongest to improve overall efficiency. Their technique divides the warehouse robots into groups, so these smaller groups of robots can be decongested faster with traditional algorithms used to coordinate robots. In the end, their method decongests the robots nearly four times faster than a strong random search method.
The technique also streamlines computation by encoding constraints only once, rather than repeating the process for each subproblem. For instance, in a warehouse with 800 robots, decongesting a group of 40 robots requires holding the other 760 robots as constraints. Other approaches require reasoning about all 800 robots once per group in each iteration.
How Amazon Air Delivers Your Packages on Time!
Robotics-as-a-Service Startup Instock Announces New Funding Led by Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund
Instock Inc, an innovator in customer fulfillment robotics, announced that it raised $3.2M in new funding, led by Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund – these new investments bring Instock’s Seed financing to a total of $6.2M. Instock’s Seed round was co-led by OneWay Ventures and Lux Capital, and funding participation also includes Commerce VC, u.ventures, Cybernetix Ventures and other investors active in the robotics and eCommerce ecosystem. With the new funding, Instock continues on its plans to democratize automation of storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) using gravity-defying robots. In January 2024, Instock will launch its first production system with a tech-forward 3PL in North America.
Industrial Automation Software Management on AWS—Best Practices for Operational Excellence
Operational and maintenance tasks can become complex, and change control becomes challenging as the number of PLCs and robotics or other automation systems increases. Problems arise when the right version and right configuration of the code is not found. While code and configuration management is a standard DevOps practice for software development, these practices are not as common in the world of industrial automation, primarily due to lack of good tooling. These challenges can now be solved through systematic, secure, and easily accessible solutions in the AWS cloud.
One such solution is Copia Automation’s Git-based source control (Git is an open-source DevOps tool for source code management). Copia Automation brings the power of a modern source control system (specifically, Git) to industrial automation. The Copia solution is deployed in Amazon’s own AWS account. In this type of deployment model, Amazon is responsible for managing and configuring its own infrastructure needed to run Copia’s software.
Amazon Introducing Warehouse Overhaul With Robotics to Speed Deliveries
Amazon is introducing an array of new artificial intelligence and robotics capabilities into its warehouse operations that will reduce delivery times and help identify inventory more quickly. The revamp will change the way Amazon moves products through its fulfillment centers with new AI-equipped sortation machines and robotic arms. It is also set to alter how many of the company’s vast army of workers do their jobs. Amazon says its new robotics system, named Sequoia after the giant trees native to California’s Sierra Nevada region, is designed for both speed and safety. Humans are meant to work alongside new machines in a way that should reduce injuries, the company says.
Amazon said it would also start to test a bipedal robot named Digit in its operations. Digit, which is designed by Agility Robotics, can move, grasp and handle items, and will initially be used by the company to pick up and move empty tote containers.
Amazon unveils new AI-powered technology to inspect delivery vans
📷 Making automated visual-inspection systems practical
Using supervised learning to train anomaly localization models has major drawbacks compared to images of defect-free products, images of defective products are scarce; and labeling defective-product images is expensive. Consequently, our benchmarking framework doesn’t require any anomalous images in the training phase. Instead, from the defect-free examples, the model learns a distribution of typical image features.
We have released our benchmark in the hope that other researchers will expand on it, to help bridge the gap between the impressive progress on anomaly localization in research and the challenges of real-world implementation.
Collaborative Robotics Raises $30M Series A
Collaborative Robotics, a leader in the development of practical collaborative robots (cobots), announced it has raised $30M in Series A funding led by new anchor investor, Sequoia Capital, bringing the total amount raised to over $40M. The funds will enable Collaborative Robotics to begin scaling early field deployments and manufacturing of its novel cobot. Sequoia Capital led the funding round, with Alfred Lin joining the board. Other contributors include Khosla Ventures and Mayo Clinic, with Calibrate, Neo, and 1984.vc expanding existing investments. Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Consumer, Fuel Capital, and MVP Ventures added to the pool. The company was founded in 2022 by Brad Porter, former VP of Amazon Robotics.
Predicting congestion in fleets of robots
Many Amazon fulfillment centers use mobile robots to move shelves, retrieve products, and deliver them to workers for sorting, reducing the need for employees to walk long distances. For simplicity and scalability, the path-planning algorithm those robots currently use focuses on individual agents and ignores interactions between multiple agents.
In a paper we presented at this year’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), we propose a deep-learning model that can predict congestion on the floor in real time. We tested the model’s predictions in simulations of two downstream applications: dynamic path planning in sortation centers, where our model improved throughout by 4.4%, and travel time estimation, where it improved the mean absolute percentage error by 30% to 40% relative to the current production methods.
CoreTigo Receives Investment from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund to Accelerate Industrial Connectivity
CoreTigo, an industrial wireless automation solution provider, announced today that Amazon has joined their Series B1 round of fundraising. Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund investment brings CoreTigo’s Series B1 round to a total of $18M and joins CoreTigo’s strategic investors, including, Emerson Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and Verizon Ventures, among others.
🦾 Amazon’s New Robots Are Rolling Out an Automation Revolution
Proteus is part of an army of smarter robots currently rolling into Amazon’s already heavily automated fulfillment centers. Some of these machines, such as Proteus, will work among humans. And many of them take on tasks previously done by people. A robot called Sparrow, introduced in November 2022, can pick individual products from storage cubbies and place them into larger plastic bins—a step towards human-like dexterity, a holy grail of robotics and a bottleneck in the automation of a lot of manual work. Amazon also last year invested in a startup that makes humanoid robots capable of carrying boxes around.
Amazon’s latest robots could bring about a company-wide—and industry-wide—shift in the balance between automation and people. When Amazon first rolled out large numbers of robots, after acquiring startup Kiva Systems and its shelf-carrying robots in 2012, the company redesigned its fulfillment centers and distribution network, speeding up deliveries and capturing even more business. The ecommerce firm may now be on the cusp of a similar shift, with the new robots already starting to reshape fulfillment centers and how its employees work. Certain jobs will be eliminated while new ones will emerge—just as long as its business continues growing. And competitors, as always, will be forced to adapt or perish.
Amazon Turns to AI to Weed Out Damaged Goods
The AI checks items during the picking and packing process. Goods are picked for individual orders and placed into bins that move through an imaging station, where they are checked to confirm the right products have been selected. That imaging station will now also evaluate whether any items are damaged. If something is broken, the bin will move to a worker who will take a closer look. If everything looks fine, the order will be moved along to be packed and shipped to the customer.
Amazon so far has implemented the AI at two fulfillment centers and plans to roll out the system at 10 more sites in North America and Europe. The company has found the AI is three times as effective at identifying damage as a warehouse worker, said Christoph Schwerdtfeger, a software development manager at Amazon.
🦾 Amazon releases largest dataset for training 'pick and place' robots
In an effort to improve the performance of robots that pick, sort, and pack products in warehouses, Amazon has publicly released the largest dataset of images captured in an industrial product-sorting setting. Where the largest previous dataset of industrial images featured on the order of 100 objects, the Amazon dataset, called ARMBench, features more than 190,000 objects. As such, it could be used to train “pick and place” robots that are better able to generalize to new products and contexts.
The scenario in which the ARMBench images were collected involves a robotic arm that must retrieve a single item from a bin full of items and transfer it to a tray on a conveyor belt. The variety of objects and their configurations and interactions in the context of the robotic system make this a uniquely challenging task.
Amazon Robotics Deploys First Fully Autonomous Robot With NVIDIA Isaac Sim
📦 How AWS used ML to help Amazon fulfillment centers reduce downtime by 70%
The retail leader has announced it uses Amazon Monitron, an end-to-end machine learning (ML) system to detect abnormal behavior in industrial machinery — that launched in December 2020 — to provide predictive maintenance. As a result, Amazon has reduced unplanned downtime at the fulfillment centers by nearly 70%, which helps deliver more customer orders on time.
Monitron receives automatic temperature and vibration measurements every hour, detecting potential failures within hours, compared with 4 weeks for the previous manual techniques. In the year and a half since the fulfillment centers began using it, they have helped avoid about 7,300 confirmed issues across 88 fulfillment center sites across the world.
How a universal model is helping one generation of Amazon robots train the next
In short, building a dataset big enough to train a demanding machine learning model requires time and resources, with no guarantee that the novel robotic process you are working toward will prove successful. This became a recurring issue for Amazon Robotics AI. So this year, work began in earnest to address the data scarcity problem. The solution: a “universal model” able to generalize to virtually any package segmentation task.
To develop the model, Meeker and her colleagues first used publicly available datasets to give their model basic classification skills — being able to distinguish boxes or packages from other things, for example. Next, they honed the model, teaching it to distinguish between many types of packaging in warehouse settings — from plastic bags to padded mailers to cardboard boxes of varying appearance — using a trove of training data compiled by the Robin program and half a dozen other Amazon teams over the last few years. This dataset comprised almost half a million annotated images.
The universal model now includes images of unpackaged items, too, allowing it to perform segmentation across a greater diversity of warehouse processes. Initiatives such as multimodal identification, which aims to visually identify items without needing to see a barcode, and the automated damage detection program are accruing product-specific data that could be fed into the universal model, as well as images taken on the fulfillment center floor by the autonomous robots that carry crates of products.
Amazon’s New Robot Can Handle Most Items in the Everything Store
Sparrow could shift the balance between humans and machines in the company’s warehouses, using machine learning algorithms and a custom gripper. Sparrow is designed to pick out items piled in shelves or bins so they can be packed into orders for shipping to customers. That’s one of the most difficult tasks in warehouse robotics because there are so many different objects, each with different shapes, textures, and malleability, that can be piled up haphazardly. Sparrow takes on that challenge by using machine learning and cameras to identify objects piled in a bin and plan how to grab one using a custom gripper with several suction tubes. Amazon demonstrated Sparrow for the first time today at the company’s robotics manufacturing facility in Massachusetts.
Using graph neural networks to recommend related products
In experiments, we found that our approach outperformed state-of-the-art baselines by 30% to 160%, as measured by HitRate and mean reciprocal rank, both of which compare model predictions to actual customer co-purchases. We have begun to deploy this model in production.
The main difficulty with using graph neural networks (GNNs) to do related-product recommendation is that the relationships between products are asymmetric. It makes perfect sense to recommend a phone case to someone who’s buying a new phone but less sense to recommend a phone to someone who’s buying a case. We solve this problem by producing two embeddings of every graph node: one that characterizes its role as the source of a related-product recommendation and one that characterizes its role as the target. We also present a new loss function that encourages related-product recommendation (RPR) models to select products along outbound graph edges and discourages them from recommending products along inbound edges.
Electra raises $85M to electrify and decarbonize iron and steelmaking with no green premium
Electra, a green iron company, has raised $85 million to produce Low-Temperature Iron (LTI) from commercial and low-grade ores using zero-carbon intermittent electricity. Electra’s process emits zero carbon dioxide emissions and carries zero green premium, meaning it will cost the same or less than existing production methods powered by fossil fuels.
Electra, founded by entrepreneurs with decades of experience developing complex electrochemical systems, has created a novel process to electrochemically refine iron ore into pure iron at 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) using renewable electricity and then convert the iron to steel using the existing infrastructure of electricity-powered arc furnaces. By comparison, 69% of steel today is made at approximately 1,600 degrees Celsius (2,912 degrees Fahrenheit) using coal, emitting about two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel produced.
Data-driven fault identification is key to more sustainable facilities management
HVAC units are central to a building and constitute roughly 50% of a building’s energy consumption. As a result, they are well instrumented and generally follow a rules-based approach. The downside: this approach can lead to many false alarms and building managers rely on manual inspection and occupants to communicate important faults that require attention. Building managers and engineers focus significant time and budget on HVAC systems, but nevertheless HVAC system faults still can account for 5% to 20% of energy waste.
A building’s data model, and the larger building management schema, are established when the building first opens. Alerts, alarms, and performance data are issued through the BMS and a manager will notify a building services team to take action as needed. However, as the building and infrastructure ages many alarms become endemic and are difficult to remedy. Alarm fatigue is a term often used to describe the resulting BMS operator experience.
Amazon is buying Cloostermans, a mechatronics specialist in Belgium, to ramp up its robotics operations
Amazon has made a string of startup acquisitions over the years to build out its robotics business; now, the e-commerce leviathan is taking an interesting turn in that strategy as it expands its industrial warehouse capabilities. Amazon is acquiring Cloostermans, a company out of Belgium that is a specialist in mechatronics. It’s been building technology to move and stack heavy palettes and totes, and robotics used to package products for customer orders. Amazon has been using those products as a customer of Cloostermans’ since 2019 for e-commerce operations; it’s making the acquisition to ramp up its R&D and deployment in that area.
Amazon’s Janus framework lifts continual learning to the next level
“The problem with machine learning is that models must adapt to continually changing data conditions,” says Cassie Meeker, an Amazon Robotics applied scientist who is an expert user of Amazon’s continuous learning system. “Amazon is a global company — the types of packages we ship and the distribution of these packages changes frequently. Our models need to adapt to these changes while maintaining high performance. To do this, we require continual learning.” To get there, Meeker’s team created a new learning system—a framework powerful and smart enough to adapt to distribution shifts in real time.
How Amazon learned to cut its cardboard waste
David Gasperino, an Amazon principal research scientist, led the technical development of PackOpt, which is helping Amazon’s stakeholders to not only minimize the amount of “air” shipped to customers, but also helping Amazon deliver on its Climate Pledge commitment to reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2040.
“To create an optimal set of boxes, you need to select a small subset of columns to pack all of the shipments, and those columns must lead to the smallest overall box volume when you sum it all up,” explains Gasperino. It is a hard challenge — literally. “This problem belongs to a theoretical class of problems called ‘NP hard’
Amazon Shows Off Impressive New Warehouse Robots
Proteus is our first fully autonomous mobile robot. Historically, it’s been difficult to safely incorporate robotics in the same physical space as people. We believe Proteus will change that while remaining smart, safe, and collaborative.
Proteus autonomously moves through our facilities using advanced safety, perception, and navigation technology developed by Amazon. The robot was built to be automatically directed to perform its work and move around employees—meaning it has no need to be confined to restricted areas. It can operate in a manner that augments simple, safe interaction between technology and people—opening up a broader range of possible uses to help our employees—such as the lifting and movement of GoCarts, the nonautomated, wheeled transports used to move packages through our facilities.
How Amazon robots navigate congestion
“When we first started looking at it, we thought it would take more than 8,000 robots to keep an Amazon fulfillment center running,” Durham said. “There just was not enough room for them all. That’s when we said, ‘Wow, we really have to solve the congestion problem.’ And we have addressed it — we’ve gotten dramatically more efficient.”
While good work allocation and route decisions smooth traffic flow and reduce unnecessary trips, managing the actual movement of robots is also important. To simplify the task, Amazon’s cloud computing service creates the virtual equivalent of a map of a city grid, on which robots can travel ‘north-south’ or ‘east-west’. Once a robot picks up a pod, the computing service creates a route to its final destination.
Amazon launches $1 billion fund to invest in warehouse technologies
Amazon on Thursday launched a $1 billion fund to invest in companies developing supply chain, logistics and fulfillment technologies. The first round of investments will focus on technologies that can speed up deliveries and improve the safety of workers in its warehouses. Start-ups backed by the new fund include Modjoul, a company developing wearable safety technology that issues alerts and recommendations aimed at reducing injuries.
Mantis Robotics Announces Seed Investment to Drive Innovation in Robotics Safety Motion Technologies
Mantis Robotics, a new entry to the robotics industry, has announced a seed investment from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. Mantis Robotics is a robotics hardware and software company developing a tactile robotic arm that can cohesively work alongside people. Their sensing and safety motion technologies promote safer environments where people and robots can work together efficiently. Mantis Robotics plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering teams and accelerate its product development. The company targets to deploy its first robotic systems later this year.
Mantis’ robotic arm is designed to safely perform tasks in continuously changing environments. Its scalable safety motion architecture, paired with its intuitive software, enables truly flexible automation processes at factories and warehouses.
At Amazon Robotics, simulation gains traction
“To develop complex robotic manipulation systems, we need both visual realism and accurate physics,” says Marchese. “There aren’t many simulators that can do both. Moreover, where we can, we need to preserve and exploit structure in the governing equations — this helps us analyze and control the robotic systems we build.”
Drake, an open-source toolbox for modeling and optimizing robots and their control system, brings together several desirable elements for online simulation. The first is a robust multibody dynamics engine optimized for simulating robotic devices. The second is a systems framework that lets Amazon scientists write custom models and compose these into complex systems that represent actual robots. The third is what he calls a “buffet of well-tested solvers” that resolve numerical optimizations at the core of Amazon’s models, sometimes as often as every time step of the simulation. Lastly, is its robust contact solver. It calculates the forces that occur when rigid-body items interact with one another in a simulation.
Amazon Robotics Builds Digital Twins of Warehouses with NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim
How pioneering deep learning is reducing Amazon’s packaging waste
Fortunately, machine learning approaches — particularly deep learning — thrive on big data and massive scale, and a pioneering combination of natural language processing and computer vision is enabling Amazon to hone in on using the right amount of packaging. These tools have helped Amazon drive change over the past six years, reducing per-shipment packaging weight by 36% and eliminating more than a million tons of packaging, equivalent to more than 2 billion shipping boxes.
“When the model is certain of the best package type for a given product, we allow it to auto-certify it for that pack type,” says Bales. “When the model is less certain, it flags a product and its packaging for testing by a human.” The technology is currently being applied to product lines across North America and Europe, automatically reducing waste at a growing scale.
The evolution of Amazon’s inventory planning system
Forecasting models developed by Amazon’s Supply Chain Optimization Technologies organization predict the demand for every product. Buying systems determine the right level of product to purchase from different suppliers, while large-scale placement systems determine the optimal location for products across the hundreds of facilities belonging to Amazon’s global fulfillment network.
“In 2016, Amazon’s supply chain network was designed for scenarios where inventory from any fulfillment center could be shipped to any customer to meet a two-day promise,” said Salal Humair, senior principal research scientist at Amazon who has been with the company for seven years. This design was inadequate for the new world in which Amazon was operating; one shaped by what Humair calls the “globalization-localization imperative.”
A new multi-echelon inventory system developed by SCOT (a project whose roots stretch back to 2016) is a significant break from the past. The heart of the model is a multi-product, multi-fulfillment center, capacity-constrained model for optimizing inventory levels for multiple delivery speeds, under a dynamic fulfillment policy. The framework then uses a Lagrangian-type decomposition framework to control and optimize inventory levels across Amazon’s network in near real-time.
Broadly speaking, decomposition is a mathematical technique that breaks a large, complex problem up into smaller and simpler ones. Each of these problems is then solved in parallel or sequentially. The Lagrangian method of decomposition factors complicated constraints into the solution, while providing a ‘cost’ for violating these constraints. This cost makes the problem easier to solve by providing an upper bound to the maximization problem, which is critical when planning for inventory levels at Amazon’s scale.
In Amazon’s Flagship Fulfillment Center, the Machines Run the Show
More than the physical robots, the stars of Amazon’s facilities are the algorithms—sets of computer instructions designed to solve specific problems. Software determines how many items a facility can handle, where each product is supposed to go, how many people are required for the night shift during the holiday rush, and which truck is best positioned to get a stick of deodorant to a customer on time. “We rely on the software to help us make the right decisions,” says Shobe, BFI4’s general manager.
When managers wanted to figure out how many people they needed at each station to keep up with customer orders, they once used Excel and their gut. Then, starting in about 2014, the company flew spreadsheet jockeys from warehouses around the country to Seattle and put them in a conference room with software engineers, who distilled their work and automated it. The resulting AutoFlow program was clunky at first, spitting out recommendations to put half an employee at one station and half an employee at another, recalls David Glick, a former Amazon logistics executive who supervised initial development of the software. Eventually the system learned that humans can’t be split in half.
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The history of Amazon’s forecasting algorithm
Historical patterns can be leveraged to make decisions on inventory levels for products with predictable consumption patterns — think household staples like laundry detergent or trash bags. However, most products exhibit a variability in demand due to factors that are beyond Amazon’s control.
Today, Amazon’s forecasting team has drawn on advances in fields like deep learning, image recognition and natural language processing to develop a forecasting model that makes accurate decisions across diverse product categories. Arriving at this unified forecasting model hasn’t been the result of one “eureka” moment. Rather, it has been a decade-plus long journey.
Amazon’s robot arms break ground in safety, technology
Robin, one of the most complex stationary robot arm systems Amazon has ever built, brings many core technologies to new levels and acts as a glimpse into the possibilities of combining vision, package manipulation and machine learning, said Will Harris, principal product manager of the Robin program.
Those technologies can be seen when Robin goes to work. As soft mailers and boxes move down the conveyor line, Robin must break the jumble down into individual items. This is called image segmentation. People do it automatically, but for a long time, robots only saw a solid blob of pixels.
The case of the missing toilet paper: How the coronavirus exposed U.S. supply chain flaws
Before executives at consumer-goods giant Kimberly-Clark rushed to shut their offices on Friday the 13th of March, they convened for one last emergency meeting. Commuting home that final time, Arist Mastorides, president of family care for North America, stopped at his local Walmart, on the edge of Lake Winnebago in Neenah, Wis., to see the emergency firsthand. Mastorides oversees toilet paper brands like Cottonelle and Scott, but that evening he could find none of his own products. “A long gondola shelf that’s completely empty of bathroom and facial tissue, I never in my life thought I would ever see that,” he says. “That’s a very unsettling thing.”
From apple juice to antibiotics: Coronavirus epidemic could cause U.S. shortages
The toll of the ongoing coronavirus epidemic in human life is already devastating enough. But as quarantines continue in China, it looks like the global economic impact of the virus could be incredibly destructive too.
China is a manufacturing superpower, supplying both critical equipment and items of convenience. With some of the country’s citizens unable to report to work and exports curtailed, there are already shortages that have some companies worried.
Amazon Acquires Kiva Systems for $775 Million
Amazon announced that it is acquiring Kiva Systems, a North Reading, Mass.-based company that invented a revolutionary way of managing vast warehouses by using fleets of mobile robots to sort, organize, and transport inventory. Amazon agreed to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Kiva for approximately US $775 million in cash. The companies expect to close the acquisition in the second quarter of 2012.
And what does Kiva do that got Amazon so interested? Basically, Kiva has reinvented the centuries-old warehouse business, transforming distribution centers – which previously relied on slow-moving humans to walk around picking and packing goods – into a buzzing hive of superefficient, tireless robotic workers.