Amazon's sprawling warehouse robot factories offer a glimpse into modern US manufacturing

Amazon manufactures and tests its Hercules and Proteus robots inside a massive facility in North Reading, Massachusetts.Madeline Stone / BIBusiness Insider recently toured two facilities where Amazon designs and manufactures its robots.Amazon has hundreds of thousands of robots working in its sortation and fulfillment centers.Its facilities give an inside peek at what modern manufacturing looks like.Inside an unassuming office park in North Reading, Massachusetts, Amazon employees are hard at work building robots to support its vast network of fulfillment centers.This facility, along with another about 50 miles away in Westborough, provides a modern view of US manufacturing.President Donald Trump has made his pledge to bring manufacturing back to the US a cornerstone of his administration. But there appears to be a growing appetite for reshoring among company CEOs, a recent annual survey from consulting firm Kearney found. While tariffs and geopolitical tensions provide extra incentive to do so, some obstacles remain, the Kearney analysts wrote. People also aren't necessarily clamoring to work in factories. A poll by the Cato Institute done last year found that while a majority of Americans believed that the US would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing, only a small percentage said they personally want to work on a factory floor.'A good attitude' and the 'ability to problem solve'The 209,000-square-foot facility in North Reading was previously the home of Kiva Systems before Amazon acquired the mobile robotics company for $775 million in 2012.Elevated platforms look down on an open floor area where robot models named Hercules and Proteus come off a manufacturing line. They have their batteries charged and systems tested, and then file themselves away to be shipped to fulfillment centers in a process Amazon calls a "robot graduation." Both types of robots transport heavy pods of items around Amazon's fulfillment centers, but while Hercules follows a preordained path marked on the floor, Proteus can sense people and humans in its path and make its own decisions about where to go.There are four manufacturing lines in the facility, each with 10 stations. Lights above each station signal green when everything is in place and red when something is wrong.Workers build robots on four assembly lines inside Amazon's North Reading, Massachusetts, facility.Madeline StoneTye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told Business Insider on a recent visit to the facilities that the company is proud of the fact that it manufactures its robots in Massachusetts."We know that it can be done and we can do that very efficiently and employ the local workforce," Brady said.A recent Morgan Stanley report estimated that Amazon's investments in robotics could save the company as much as $10 billion a year.Amazon Robotics's facility in Westborough is even larger than the one in North Reading, stretching about 350,000 square feet. In that facility, Amazon workers manufacture robots that can sort, like one called Sequoia that combines several different robotic processes into one storage system. Rows upon rows of cables hang down above containerized robotic storage systems that are testing software updates behind chain-link fences, safely away from human workers.Amazon manufactures sortation robots like Sequoia inside its Westborough facility.Madeline StoneBoth the North Reading and Westborough facilities also have corporate offices and research and development labs located directly off the manufacturing floor. Brady said the location is a "competitive advantage" because their engineers and manufacturing employees can work together from the start."And we've created many, many jobs because of that," he said.Erica McClosky, director of manufacturing and technical operations at Amazon Robotics, said that about 300 people work on the more physical tasks involved in building and maintaining a fleet of robots that's more than 750,000 strong.Erica McClosky leads manufacturing for Amazon Robotics.Madeline StoneThe majority of workers are assemblers who work on the line itself. Another team is responsible for testing robots before they go out to fulfillment centers and for repairing them when they're experiencing issues. There are also employees who receive and ship out the materials needed to assemble the robots. Amazon sources mechanical parts from local suppliers as well as global ones.These employees typically don't need advanced technical knowledge to do their jobs."Generally, the requirement for us is a good attitude, ability to problem solve, and be curious," McClosky said.In addition to those employees, about 150 engineers support and assist them. That includes process engineers who work alongside assemblers as they learn how to build a product, as well as test and quality engineers. Technical program managers bring the whole process together.'There's no doubt that we're seeing jobs change'Brady said Amazon's work is just the beginning of what's possible in "physical AI," a term used to describe the process of bringing AI to robots that can perceive and react to the real world."When I speak about physical AI, it would be like us talking about the computer in the '50s," he said. "I really foresee the future filled with physical AI systems that enable and augment a person's capability to do their job."He added that the team aims for the robots to be collaborative and always work in concert with humans.The work that happens in Amazon's Massachusetts facilities ultimately plays out in Amazon's sortation and fulfillment centers, where orders are picked, packed, and prepared for delivery. About 75% of the packages that Amazon processes touch at least one of its robotics systems.Julie Mitchell, director of robotic sortation technology at Amazon Robotics, said her design teams get direct feedback from operations teams at fulfillment centers so they know what tasks need to be automated and what may or may not be working. Mitchell and McClosky's overall goal is to optimize manufacturing and design so that robots arriving at a fulfillment center are ready to get to work."We partner really early on to get their feedback at the very beginning of our designs so that we're always going in the right direction with our technology," Mitchell said.The robot named Sequoia is a sortation and storage system.Madeline StoneAmazon recently opened a next-generation fulfillment center in Shreveport, Louisiana, with 10 times the number of robots than older fulfillment centers. Brady said that 30% more of the jobs in the Shreveport fulfillment center are more technical in nature than in other locations."There's no doubt that we're seeing jobs change," Brady said.But rather than have robots replace jobs, Brady said that Amazon is committing significant resources to upskilling its employees. That includes technical apprenticeship programs and paying for some employees' college tuition."You need both people and machines to work together in order to achieve this task," he said. "If you can blend the best of both worlds — the common sense, the thinking at a higher level, the reasoning, understanding overall building flow, understanding the problems that need to get resolved — and then let the machines do the menial and mundane and repetitive, then you actually have created a more productive system."Read the original article on Business Insider

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