Let's Tear Down a Kiva Bot! (robohub.org)

Ben Einstein, writes new submitter Robofenix2, has torn down a Kiva bot -- a mobile ground-based warehouse delivery drone, aka Amazon's busiest employee. These robotic systems have revolutionised the warehouse distribution industry helping deliver packages. Ben was able to get his hands on an older generation, end-of-life Kiva bot and cracked open its bright orange shell to expose a brilliant piece of engineering; this post shares the fruits of Kiva's hard work. This 2011 video is also worth viewing, not least to see Kiva's shelf-lifting corkscrew action.

Comments

LET'S SLASHDOT ROBOHUB!

[Thud457]

wow, haven't seen that in a while...

Meh. Logistics is boring.

[jeffb (2.718)]

Sure, it's a "robot" (a machine that moves around and does stuff), but really it's just some motors, linkages, and a bunch of software that we aren't allowed to see anyhow. Who cares?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go check the mail. I ordered some new spools of filament for my 3D printer from Amazon on Saturday, and they'd better be here.

Re:Meh. Logistics is boring.

[bluefoxlucid]

It's a lawnmower with a computer in it.

Here we go

[Elfich47]

This is just some duct tape and an Amazon Echo away from Skynet producing terminators.

End of all our jobs!

[bluefoxlucid]

This is how Amazon will end all our jobs! They're able to sell products 40% cheaper than anyone else, which is leaving us with damn near twice as much money in our pockets, which we spend on other stuff, meaning people have to make other stuff, so we have to create all these job-ending jobs where people who aren't plodding around warehouses are doing something else useful!

...wait I think I did that wrong.

Re:End of all our jobs!

[Anonymous Coward]

What stuff on there really is any cheaper these days? I've been buying from them less often in recent years as I've been able to find the same price or even lower at local stores where I can at least have it right away. Plus since they have to collect sales tax now in my state that gap has been closed as well.

Re:End of all our jobs!

[Darinbob]

They have a core group of dedicated fans. They don't care about the cheapest, they care that it's online and that they never leave their chairs. Amazon has been getting people hooked on this with Amazon Prime, so even if some people care about the money they still feel that they must make use of that expenditure and get free shipping rather than head down to the local stores with the local employees.

(I laugh when some of these fans say "but Prime is essentially free because it pays for itself!")

Re:End of all our jobs!

[radarskiy]

How dare you learn about how capitalism works before posting about capitalism? We *all* might end up learning something!

Re:End of all our jobs!

[bluefoxlucid]

There would be. We've been eliminating jobs since hunter-gatherers stopped working 20 hours per week just to acquire food (much less prepare it) for each one person, instead letting agrarians farm it so they had time to make tools. (Now less than 2% of our society is agricultural workers, and the other 98% build roads and put rocket ships on the moon.)

People become unable to find work when there aren't enough consumer dollars to pay them.

Think about it for a minute. Create a level, communist utopia, the sort of idealized state where every person works, every person gets, everyone has exactly the same. Every need covered, every luxury in every individual's hands. Exactly as much labor time as everyone can apply (say the 40hr/wk standard, or a 24hr/wk 3-day week, or whatever you want) is used to make all this stuff.

Now give some people more, but don't make anyone work more.

Since the same work is done (and we haven't created new, efficient technology), there's the same amount of stuff. Someone has more, but no more is made, so someone else has less. Now you have rich and poor. If your society is sufficiently wealthy, the rich have yachts and the poor have hovels; if your society isn't sufficiently wealthy, the rich have horses and carriages, and the poor starve in the streets.

In a money-based system, this translates to consumer buying power. Some people get paid $5/hr, others get paid $50/hr. There's a cycle in which you eliminate jobs by reducing labor to make a thing, which makes it cheaper--say food costs $200/month, and you figure out how to make it for $100/month simply by cutting total labor in half, great. 2% of our population is agricultural workers, so suddenly 1% of our population is agricultural workers (actually, less than 1%, plus oil workers, power plant workers, transporters, miners, machinists, and everyone else involved in creating the tools of the new process, totaling 1%). 1% of our population becomes unemployed.

In trade for this unemployment, the remaining consumer population (approximately 98% of the original consumer population) all have about $100/month more unspent income per person in their household. 60% of our labor for products is foreign (Chinese factory) and 40% is domestic (local business logistics, shipping, advertising, retail). We boost up our production by about the same proportion, creating a bunch of low-cost jobs outside America, and supporting them with high-cost jobs inside America. This reciprocates, and we end up ticking up our local employment by 1%, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Now we have our jobs back.

Unemployment settles on a certain nominal rate depending on how fast you eliminate and create jobs and how much pressure you put on the economy by raising the cost of goods. Minimum wage, payroll taxes, and income tax on labor directly raise labor costs; sales and VAT taxes add to the price, at the very minimum acting as a rise in labor cost by the percentage tax, but the proportion increases when the price increases (i.e. more mark-up means more cost). Broad consumer goods affect more of the purchasing power, and so you have loss: consumers can't buy as many things, thus we don't need to produce as many things, thus we don't need jobs, thus some people go unemployed.

The Citizen's Dividend I designed actually has a potential flaw in that it creates too much employment. Crude projections of one-cycle reciprocation indicate that rewriting the Fair Labor Standards Act to define full-time as 26-32 hours (4 day work week) would create enough unemployment to counter this, reducing total unemployment from 8% to 7% in the end. (Essentially, cutting back the work week but retaining the same standard of living demands a rise in the cost of goods, which counteracts the excess employment caused by my economic meddling.) I've got contingencies for everything.

Full employment, by the way, would destroy the economy. It would become unable to produce what is demanded, and the income supply would suddenly stutter. Most likely, it would hobble along with wildly fluctuating prices and unemployment rates.

Re:End of all our jobs!

[bluefoxlucid]

It was kind of a crude joke. It works that way, but there's a long cycle involved. Essentially, you lose jobs today, and recreate them in 3-5 years; our unemployment rate reflects this happening across a huge number of markets, creating jobs as we lose other jobs. That's why we have welfare: Unemployment is a necessity if you want to increase the standard-of-living.

These would be useful in robot wars!

[iplayfast]

Where can I buy one?