Kiva Warehouse Robots (Amazon Robotics)

Kiva robots are flat, low drive units that slide under a shelf, lift it, and carry it to a human worker. The company that made them, Kiva Systems, was bought by Amazon in 2012 and later became Amazon Robotics.

The big idea

In a traditional warehouse, workers walk long distances to find items. With Kiva-style systems, the shelf walks to the worker. This turns a walking job into a standing, picking job, and the robots handle the transport.

How it works

• The warehouse floor has markers the robots use to find their position.
• A central system assigns jobs to hundreds of robots at once and plans paths so they do not collide.
• Robots park the shelves again after the worker has picked the item.

Why it matters

It is one of the clearest examples of robots working at scale. Many other companies now build similar warehouse robots. The lesson is that fleet software and planning are just as important as the robot itself.

Limits

These robots move shelves, but humans still pick most items, because grasping many different products is a hard problem for robot arms.