Warehouse 'Bots Do Battle to Make Same-Day Delivery a Reality

The robots zipping across the aluminum grid look less like Star Wars droids and more like little red wagons. But online retailers like Amazon are racing to make deliveries even faster and cheaper to undermine one of the last major advantages of offline shopping, namely the immediacy of walking out of the store with what you bought. And on the surface, people might seem perfectly well-suited to one of online retail's core tasks: order fulfillment. With tens of thousands of items spread across tens of thousands of square feet at a typical distribution center, maintaining platoons of order fillers known as "pickers" gets costly and complicated. Even so-called "manual" systems rely on software as orders come in to point people along paths that, for instance, maximize the number of items they pick up along the way.