Amazon FC - organized tour, “chaotic storage”

Jeff Bezos started his 2010 letter to shareholders with “Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture.”

As my wife and I arrived for the tour of the 855,000 sq ft, 4 level N. Jacksonville Amazon fulfillment center (JAX2) last week, I wondered what arcane theory we would be subjected to. Nothing of that sort - our tour guide spoke plain English, was funny and translated Amazon acronyms like ARSAW and terms like Amnesty Zones. But as we left, I realized we had actually seen an application in Chaos Theory. 

While my wife focused on the process from a consumer and worker pov (how noisy the environment - we were given headsets to wirelessly communicate with our tour guide so could not really assess the level of noise, how good the benefits - fairly generous especially the education credits), I focused more on the man-machine symbiosis across the five major steps I observed - stow, pick, pack, quality assurance and SLAM (Scan, Label, Apply, Manifest).

 

Unlike other tours where I tend to wander off and take all kinds of notes, I was well behaved on this one - no photos (other than the selfie they allow you to take as a souvenir) and I stayed within the guard rails painted on the floor. That is a safety feature to keep away from the hundreds of 250 lb Kiva bots zipping along with pallets of inventory (the heavy duty ones are rated to carry loads of up to 3,000 lbs). Our guide observed that the bots are directed by reading a series of barcodes on the ground over time carve their own "tracks" on the floor. They communicate with each other and politely give right of way to colleagues with more pressing demands. They are also smart enough to stop whatever they are doing and to summon a colleague to take over if they are running low on power and need to run off to get recharged. They can certainly talk to each other but I don’t speak their language so why test their obstacle sensors which would make them stop even if I had strayed? I behaved. 

Now about the chaos. The floors, the totes, the products all have bar codes, so the machines know thanks to Convex and other scanners, and the power of AWS, where everything is. It just looks chaotic to humans. At the Universal station, where employees stow inventory onto racks the bots transport (pods in Amazon lingo) you may see a soft toy stashed next to an electronic item. Similarly at the ARSAW picking station the human is told exactly what to pick from a each section of the pod for a set of customer orders and load them into a yellow tote.  Looks zany to a human observer (why load multiple customer orders onto a tote?) but again the system knows the id of the tote and where each item is. Just to double check, after a pod leaves a ARSAW station a VBI lighting panel with cameras scans it.13.5 miles of conveyors move the 40,000+ yellow totes across the fulfillment center.

Few steps later, it is time to deliver items for each order to a packing station. Here the display tells the human operator the ideal box size to assemble, and cuts to measure the packaging tape. Work moves to the human not the other way around. More scanning and checks later the system prints out a label for the package. But this label does not have customer information. For privacy reasons, that address label is machine generated and stamped later by a Mettler Toledo machine which also verifies the weight of the package. Along the way there is QA including a section humorously titled “Jackpot”. Now the packages are ready to be shipped. Here a sorter reads the labels and sends them on shutes and more belts to the loading dock. Algorithms help map out the optimal “wall” of packages to load on each trailer. More apparent chaos to the human eye, but actually beautifully choreographed.  

We did not see the Robo-Stow at this center - the 6 ton male African elephant-sized robot which can move massive loads. We had seen enough chaos for a day. 

We left in awe. And btw “Chaotic Storage” is officially part of Amazon lingo. Someday, may be Bezos may actually discuss it in detail in a shareholder letter. He will likely include the just introduced Xanthus and Pegasus bots. Amazon Robotics keep pushing the boundaries to allow the company to scale massively. 

 

Comments

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