Amazon, which already offered users a wide variety of deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, on Sunday announced more details about its eighth-generation fulfillment centers, revealing that it’s putting to good use a large number of robots to help out with order fulfillment and hopefully improve ship times during the busy Christmas shopping season.
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“The Amazon fulfillment teams are dedicated to innovating in our fulfillment centers to increase speed of delivery while enabling greater local selection at lower costs for our customers,” Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations and customer service Dave Clark said. “The advancements in our latest fulfillment centers hit all three of these customer desires while continuing to provide a work environment that is great for employees.”
Amazon currently has 10 new centers that include a variety of new technologies, in addition to extensive use of robots.
Amazon said that it already has more than 15,000 Roomba-like Kiva robots that help to handle orders in these fulfillment centers, also highlighting the Robo-Stow, “one of Earth’s largest robotic arms moving large quantities of inventory for customer order fulfillment.”
Amazon said it will hire about 80,000 seasonal employees to fulfill customer orders this holiday, with thousands of them expected to stay on as full-time employees after that.
A video showing these robots in action during day-to-day operations follow below.
