I went inside Amazon’s new £500m factory in Leeds and was amazed by what I saw
Yorkshire Post reporter Chris Burn was given a tour of Amazon’s latest huge facility in the region - a £500m fulfilment centre on the outskirts of Leeds fuelled by “harmony” between robots and workers.
On the three robotics floors, staff place products in four-sided towers called pods - on the other side of fences, small robots are whizzing about to drop off pods to employees or whizz off full ones for storage.
The flat machines, which look similar to the automated vacuum cleaners that are increasingly popular in many households, are called Hercules robots and scan QR codes on the floor to help reach the right locations and avoid collisions along the way.
Watching them dart along is an unexpectedly hypnotic experience.
Robots are not a new innovation for Amazon - the company acquired a robotics firm called Kiva back in 2012 and has since introduced several different types of robots across its operations.
The company itself has admitted there was some concern about what the changes would mean for jobs but says that has not been borne out by reality.
On the three robotics floors, staff place products in four-sided towers called pods - on the other side of fences, small robots are whizzing about to drop off pods to employees or whizz off full ones for storage.
The flat machines, which look similar to the automated vacuum cleaners that are increasingly popular in many households, are called Hercules robots and scan QR codes on the floor to help reach the right locations and avoid collisions along the way.
Watching them dart along is an unexpectedly hypnotic experience.
Robots are not a new innovation for Amazon - the company acquired a robotics firm called Kiva back in 2012 and has since introduced several different types of robots across its operations.
The company itself has admitted there was some concern about what the changes would mean for jobs but says that has not been borne out by reality.
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NewsTranscript
00:00We are a really young site, we've been open just four weeks, and the site will have a
00:30We'll have upwards of about 2,000 people on site getting ready for our busiest period
00:35of the year, which of course is vastly approaching in terms of the preparation for the peak season.
00:41We have several thousand robots that are effectively moving towers of our products around.
00:48And they're doing that for one simple reason, and that's to be able to help our team here
00:52on site to be able to both store our customers' products, but also to be able to pick our
00:58customers' products by moving them around and making them easily accessible for our
01:02people to be able to interact with them.
01:04It's a real technology of harmony between robots and our people here on site.