Background:
“After his experience at Webvan — which raised and then lost over $1 billion in investor capital — Kiva founder Mick Mountz realized that there had to be a breakthrough in cost reduction for large scale distribution businesses to get to the next level. He came up with the simple, but very clever, idea of having the shelves come to the packing stations at the warehouse, rather than having workers go and retrieve each product from the shelves.”
Now, modern warehouse bots trek around the warehouse via a combination of high-speed sensors and a bar code grid to fetch needed items and bring them to human workstations.
Very impressive stuff.
Urban Tech Guy Blog 