Vercelli is a small city in Italian Piedmont, halfway between Milan and Turin, more than 2,000 years old. Although some battles from classical history were fought here and it is also an area known in Italy for the excellent rice that is grown, what has begun to give it a name today is the laboratory that Amazon installed seven years ago, from which they begin Some robots are coming out that transform the ways in which we receive orders. In the Innovation Lab, the online sales multinational develops some of the most advanced robots for its logistics centers. The goal is for packages to become smaller and travel faster than ever.
Many regular Amazon users have received excessively large packages for much smaller items. That is going to end with some of the new generation robots developed in Vercelli. Since 2015, the average weight of packaging per shipment has been reduced by 41%. The data does not seem to have great relevance, but if the company’s hundreds of millions of annual shipments are counted, the result is a reduction of no less than 2 million tons of weight. The consequence of this is that fewer delivery truck routes are needed, since more packages can fit in the same space and, although the company cites above all the beneficial effect in reducing emissions, the cost savings cannot be ignored either. transportation, which Amazon does not encrypt.
The reduction of parcels has two ways. On the one hand, in the transformation of the packaging. In Vercelli, the company has a new machine capable of wrapping any object in paper, at a speed that seems like magic. And without using chemical adhesives, just with pressure. In the same operation, which lasts a blink of an eye, you attach the shipping label. But if the item is already packaged by the manufacturer, why wrap it? The first reason that comes to mind is privacy. Preventing neighbors from knowing what you buy is already a good reason for everything to be wrapped.
But Amazon has surveyed customers and many are willing to forgo the added packaging. The user must give up the additional packaging right after completing the order. Some product categories, associated with intimate issues, are excluded from this option. In the last five years, 700 million items have been shipped using this option in European countries.
A problem that arises when giving up branded boxes and envelopes is the standard Amazon code labels, which are too large for certain packaging. For this, the Innovation Lab has developed a robot that identifies the exact size of the product on the conveyor belt and attaches a much smaller label to it that allows its journey to be monitored during delivery.
Everything in Vercelli seems aimed at removing people from moving packages in logistics centers. The laboratory has found a way for a robot to change a package on a conveyor belt and for the containers that carry the packages, called totes, to be moved by robots until they reach the delivery trucks. The company assures that people are still there, precisely in control of the robot.
Amazon has 1.1 million employees working in nearly 5,000 facilities around the world. The company claims that 50,000 jobs have been improved “thanks to the use of robotics and technology” in repetitive tasks that posed physical problems in the long run. Robert Marhan, vice president of people, experience and technology for Amazon’s European operations, says that “technology will improve jobs, make our workplace safer and create new jobs.” “Today,” he adds, “instead of the employee moving from one point to another, we use robotics to bring the items to the employees.”
In 2020, Amazon created a $1 billion industrial innovation fund to invest in new robotics startups. At the Italian center (there are two other laboratories in the United States), the company shows Mantis, an amazing articulated robotic arm designed to work in an environment where there are people and slow down its activity so as not to hit them because it has a “skin” capable of detecting the human presence. Another robotic device, InStock, is a robotic cart capable of climbing, with its four wheels, the wall and the ceiling, where it is supported by a system of magnets, and carrying loads of 30 kilos. Let’s see who competes with that.
