Logistics / Fulfillment center
Amazon: Coordinating warehouse mobile robot routes
- Company
- Amazon
- Country
- United States
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Mobile robots move around Amazon fulfilment centres at large scale. When a path is blocked, waiting builds up and order handling slows down. The company described the situation by comparing it to traffic flow in a congested city.
Technology and data
DeepFleet is a generative AI based model built to coordinate the movement of the robot fleet. The material used for training is the inventory movement data Amazon accumulated inside its own facilities. Development used AWS tools including Amazon SageMaker. DeepFleet coordinates robot routes across the fulfilment network to reduce congestion and speed up order handling. It also makes it possible to place goods closer to customers. The company explained that the more data builds up, the more the system learns on its own and keeps improving.
Results
Amazon said DeepFleet improves the fleet's travel time by 10 percent. In the same announcement it said it had deployed its one millionth robot and that the network had grown to more than 300 facilities worldwide. The company explained that cutting travel time by 10 percent makes delivery faster and lowers operating cost and energy use at the same time.
Limits and open questions
The source describes the 10 percent improvement as an effect still to come, and there is no control group or per-centre figure. There is also no statement that DeepFleet has finished rolling out across all of the more than one million robots.
Sources
- Amazon deploys over 1 million robots and launches new AI foundation modelaboutamazon.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.