In March 2012, in an effort to make their distribution centers (DCs) as efficient as possible, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million and almost immediately took them in house.
There was confusion after the acquisition whether Kiva would continue providing DCs with Kiva robots. Although Kiva said that they would continue selling their technology to other retailers it soon became clear that Amazon was taking all Kiva’s production and that, at some future date, Kiva would stop supporting their existing client base and focus entirely on Amazon – which happened in April 2015 when Amazon renamed Kiva to Amazon Robotics and encouraged prospective users of Kiva technology to let Amazon Robotics and Amazon Services provide fulfillment within Amazon warehouses using Amazon robots.
In September 2014 Amazon announced the Amazon Picking Challenge, a new robot manipulation contest as part of the ICRA robot challenges. The idea was to take a difficult problem from the warehouse order-fulfillment industry and see how far contestants can get applying innovative robotics research.
When you’re shopping for the best online deals you’re probably not thinking much about the massive distribution network required to bring that pair of shoes to your doorstep. Is your quest for the best possible deal helping to usher in the next wave of automation?
Internet giants like Amazon and Google have an obligation to stay competitive and are going head-to-head over the online shopping space.
If the world outside the robotics community didn’t know about Boston Dynamics, Kiva and Nest, they do now. Recent robotics acquisitions and investments by major-league players like Google, Apple and Amazon have generated a blitz of headlines in the robotics world and beyond. Are we witnessing a power play in the making? What does it mean for the future of robotics? And is all the hype beneficial or harmful to the robotics community?
This month’s Robotics by Invitation will serve as a launch for Robohub’s newest focus series on how big time corporate attention effects the culture of robotics. In the coming weeks we will be bringing you insight from the likes of Steve Cousins, Dan Kara, Valery Komissarova, Avner Levin, Chad Partridge, Gill Pratt, Erin Rapacki, Frank Tobe, and Rob Wilson.
Today, RBI panelists Mark Stephen Meadows, AJung Moon and Alan Winfield weigh in …
Given all the chatter on drones and automation, we thought it would be a good time to dive deeper into the Kiva opportunity and potential impact on leverage/margins. For the sake of our analysis, we take a look at what the Kiva margin impact could be if Kiva automation were to be integrated across all of AMZN’s NA fulfillment operations. In short, we estimate that Kiva could drive fulfillment cost savings in the $450-900M range or be 60-120 bps accretive to CSOI margin in NA alone – underscoring a bigger global opportunity.
particularly in the area of healthcare.
It is clear to me that the next big markets for robotics are:
- SMEs (robot workers and co-workers in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)
- Medical and healthcare (nursing assistance, surgeon augmentation, operating room assistance, therapeutic assistance, home care, remote presence, hospital automation)
- Agriculture (robotically automated planting, weeding, harvesting, sorting and packaging)
- Embedded systems within our cars, trucks and taxis
January 10, 2020
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