A symphony of more than 30,000 robot-powered towers dancing around a factory floor – here’s what life is like inside Amazon’s super hi-tech Japanese distribution centre where it’s testing out technology the world will soon use.
Amazon took journalists from around the world to Japan this week to hear all its latest tech announcements, with the company .
BusinessLive got a tour of its ultra-modern centre in Chiba, a city near Tokyo, to see everything from Amazon’s newest packing technology to a chopstick voting system where Amazon can learn what meals its staff like to eat.
The heart of the complex is a gigantic warehouse floor with thousands of yellow towers of shelves whizzing around continuously. It’s a huge version of the robot warehouse floors you can see at other Amazon sites globally, including in the 海角视频.
It’s impressive from the side, where you can watch towers of shelves moving to and fro. But it’s most impressive of all from above, from where you can see thousands of yellow towers moving around, without a human in sight.
The huge robot area is fenced off and most employees will never go in. Only trained staff can go in – and when they do they wear a special vest that alerts all the robots so none of them go near.
There are 30,000 of those pods, each around 7ft tall, and they’re what visitors notice first. You could almost miss the robots themselves – Chiba has 2,600 of them.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)Each robot looks like a big blue version of a robotic vacuum cleaner. They move around the factory in a grid pattern underneath the rows and rows and shelving pods. When they get underneath the right pid, they lift it up and then take it with them to the picker or back to its storage space.
In a traditional warehouse all the same items would have been stored together. But at Amazon robotics warehouse the items are distributed across those shelving pods at random, and tracked using bar codes. Our guide told us: “On one shelf you could have a book, a movie, a bottle of vitamins and a battery.”
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)Every time an order comes in it’s sent to one of the packers at workstations alongside the robot field.
Every time a new item is needed a pod with those items on is moved by a robot so it stands next to that workstation. A light then comes on above the shelf where the product sits – you can see it in the middle of the picture below – so the picker can quickly grab the item, scan it, and put it into a tray. Our guide called it a “symphony of robotics”, and said: “The system will send the closest item to her”.
If there’s another item on the same pod, another light comes on so the picker can find it quickly. If it’s from elsewhere, the first pod will speed away and another pod will move into place.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)One worker had what looked like a dinosaur video game on one of the screens above her head.
Our guide said workers could choose to “gamify” their work by turning their scans into points on a video game, where they can compete with other workers on the floor. They stressed that it was voluntary and that people didn’t have to take part – adding: “It makes work fun”.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)There are similar robot fields at Amazon sites around the world, but there are two innovative pieces of technology that the company’s Japanese business were particularly keen to show off.
One of them is an automated paper packing machine that wraps small items quickly and with less waste.
The machine’s operator picks up a product from the tray next to them, which has been delivered by conveyor. They put that product into a slot in the machine, which is shaped almost like a pizza oven behind a continuous roll of brown paper. The machine then wraps and seals the item in thick brown paper, adding a label on the way.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)Speaking to BusinessLive at Amazon’s later Delivering the Future event in Tokyo city centre, Hiroaki Watanabe, director of Japan customer fulfilment solutions for Amazon, said: “The beauty of the machine is the length of the paper is changed based on the size of the item, therefore we can minimize the paper material.
"And also the shipping label is printed together at that time. Therefore all the shipment is complete within the machine.”
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)As Japan is such a densely populated country, land is at a premium. Many Amazon warehouses in the 海角视频, such as the one in Warrington which is also robot-powered, sprawl over larger areas – the Chiba one instead rises up four floors on a smaller site.
That means Amazon has had to make smart use of space.
Amazon’s earlier plastic wrapping machine was too tall for Chiba. So the Japanese team developed a machine that uses paper, which is more sustainable, and at 2.1m high is also the right height for Japanese facilities.
There are more than 30 machines in Japan, with a small number of machines also being tested in Australia and Italy.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)The other tech site that bosses are proud of is the “multi shuttle sorter”, which is unique to Japan and which our guide said had “revolutionised the way we are able to sort for multi item packages”.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)In other countries, when an order is received containing multiple items, the packer at an Amazon site receives one box full of products and has to take them out one by one to pack them.
But at Chiba, an elaborate robotic system separates that order onto smaller trays that are then delivered to the packer one by one, which Amazon says makes the packer’s job more efficient and means they have to do less lifting – as seen below.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)On our tour we climbed narrow staircases through the site’s machinery to watch the conveyor systems in action, with trays whizzing on rollers in all directions. The system also makes more efficient use of the tight space at Chiba.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)Later we went to the site cafeteria – where we saw that one wall was taken up with a mini “vertical farm” of lettuce plants that are used to make salads there.
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)Guides even explained that Amazon even uses data and statistics to analyse the success of the meals it serves to its 2,000 staff.
Every day, each meal on the menu is served with chopsticks in a particular colour. When the workers has finished the meal, they can drop the chopsticks into one of five bins to rate the meal from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). Amazon can then count the chopsticks and work out which meals are the most popular.
Mr Watanabe said: “We are scoring all the lunches and comparing – this is good, this is bad, we need to improve the quality or we need to replace. Every meal is assessed and modified all the time.”
(Image: BusinessLive/Reach plc)