On one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, thousands of bright-orange, pancake-shaped robots are buzzing around Amazon's shipping centers, rushing to fill the company's Cyber Monday orders.
Last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he eventually plans to use drones to deliver packages to online shoppers, but while the Federal Aviation Administration crafts official regulations for the commercial use of drones, the online retail giant has found an intermediate step: flat, wheeled robots that zoom around Amazon's warehouses, carrying 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) stacks of books, electronics and toys.
The robots navigate on a grid system made of bar-code stickers stuck to the warehouse floor. The bots know which products to gather by scanning the bar codes as they roll along. The flat robots can slip under shelves full of products, lift them up and transport them back to employees, who then sort out the individual orders. The robots can lift shelves that weigh up to 750 lbs. (340 kilograms), according to the company's website.
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