Gadgetory

meet Amazon's newest holiday workers the Kiva robots at this fulfillment center in Tracy California more than 3,000 of them cruised the warehouse floor helping employees fill millions of orders the little orange robot goes out and picks the right pot of inventory and brings it back just at the right time for the person to pick the item out to go in that customer shipment before the Kiva robots the workers used to walk the warehouse aisles picking up the items but now they stay on these platforms and the robots bring the shelves and the items directly to them the three hundred and twenty pound robots can lift up to 750 pounds they've motion sensors to detect objects in their way and can travel between 3 & 4 miles per hour amazon says the robots small footprint allows it to squeeze in 50% more inventory into this warehouse which is the size of 59 football fields they've also improved efficiency by 20% so it only takes 15 minutes to fill some orders instead of 90 on Cyber Monday last year Amazon customers ordered 426 items every second Amazon expects that number to be bigger this Cyber Monday the process at an Amazon Fulfillment Center starts when products arrive by the truckload the items are sent up to one of the 4 floors where kiba robots operate in this new generation fulfillment center we have associates who were taking products off the carts and putting them onto the shelves that are that are moved by our Kiva robots a worker finds a space to stock the item on one of the moving shelves it doesn't matter if there are paper towels next to board games just as long as the robots know where to find it among the 21 million items then the robots way to retrieve the item when someone places an order from their items are hand-picked and whisked away on miles of conveyor belts to be sorted packed and shipped there's even a robot that folds the shipping boxes well some may worry about robots taking jobs away from humans Amazon insists that is not their intention you're going to see there's 4,000 people working in this bill even with all the automation that's in place here that's because our focus on automation is about helping people do their jobs not replacing people so far ten of the 50 amazon fulfillment centers in the united states have integrated the Kiva robots in Tracy California I'm Kara Tsuboi cnet.com for CBS News