How Locus Robotics Plans to Build a Successor to Amazon's Kiva Robots
From IEEE Spectrum:
Locus’ robots are designed to work collaboratively with human workers in
a warehouse. When a worker sees a robot waiting near a shelf, the
worker reads the item needed off a screen, picks the item, and places it
on the robot. The robot then drives to the location of the next item.
Locus says it's an efficient system because humans are doing what
they’re best at, which is identifying and picking objects off of
shelves.
In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems for just over three quarters of a billion dollars,
securing for itself virtually the entire large-scale robotic logistics
market all at once. This was a particular problem for existing Kiva
customers, including Quiet Logistics, who used Kiva robots to support centralized warehouse operations for a variety of clients. Once Quiet Logistics’ contract with Kiva ran out, they’d need to find some new robots.
Recognizing the enormous value that Kiva robots provided
and the potential of the void that suddenly existed, a bunch of
companies began to target the robotic warehouse fulfillment space.
There’s Adept, Fetch, Clearpath, IAM Robotics, and Magazino,
to name just a few. Rather than rely on a new platform from someone
else, Quiet Logistics decided to develop its own fulfillment robot.
Quiet’s internal robotics project was spun out into Locus Robotics in
2014, with $8 million in Series A funding announced this May. Bruce Welty
is the chairman of Quiet Logistics, as well as the founder and chairman
of Locus Robotics. We spoke to him about the problems he saw with
Kiva’s robots, how to develop a robot from scratch, and why warehouse
robotics is predominantly a software problem.
Locus’ robot is designed to work collaboratively with humans to fill
orders in a warehouse. It’s a mobile base that can navigate autonomously
using lidar to track
its location in a pre-mapped area, with cameras and 2D barcodes for
verification. Each robot knows the location of every item in the
warehouse, and when an item needs to be picked for an order, the robot
will navigate to that item and wait.
Humans workers are assigned to patrol warehouse zones, and when they
see a robot waiting, the worker reads the item that it needs off the
screen, picks it, and moves on. The robot then drives to the location of
the next item that it needs, or heads for a shipping station. It’s a
very efficient system, since humans aren’t carrying anything or having
to roam all over a warehouse to fulfill one order: instead, they’re
doing what they’re best at, which is identifying and picking objects off
of shelves.
The following video is an excerpt from a talk by Mike Johnson, Locus Robotics’s president, that shows the system in action:...
Here’s our interview with Locus Robotics’ chairman Bruce Welty.
IEEE Spectrum: Can you give us a brief history of Locus?
Bruce Welty: Locus was incubated inside of Quiet
Logistics: originally they were the same company. The reason that we
started the company was that Quiet was a user of Kiva’s robots, and when
Amazon acquired Kiva, we decided we needed our own technology. We
actually started thinking about the design of this particular robot
starting in about 2010, when we became familiar with Kiva. We liked a
lot of things about Kiva, but there were also a lot of things about Kiva
that we didn’t like. So, we were always thinking about the next
generation of robots.
What didn’t you like about Kiva’s robots, and how did that inform your thinking about what you wanted to create with Locus?
The main things that we didn’t like about Kiva really came down to
ease of use, expense, and safety. As you might imagine, the very first
iteration of something is about making it work. So, Kiva wasn’t really
that concerned about cost, or how much work it was to implement. They
didn’t think about the implications of how much it weighed, or whether
or not it was safe around people, since the robot space excluded people....MUCH MORE
