Amazon robots swarm warehouse to ship your gifts quickly

This year when you buy your holiday gifts from Amazon, nobody will be scanning the shelves of warehouses looking for that hat or e-Reader to load onto a truck that will make its way to your home.

(Image via Amazon.com, Inc.)

In honor of Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, Amazon revealed its new generation fulfillment center that uses robots, vision systems and other high-end technology that will have your gifts delivered faster this holiday season.

We’re not talking about last year’s long-term plan for delivery drones.  This year the company has employed over 15,000 Kiva robots in fulfillment centers across the United States to help increase delivery speed.

Kiva robots. (Image via Amazon.com, Inc.)

The technology for these robots comes from Kiva Systems, a robotics company that Amazon bought back in 2012.

The 320-pound orange robots slide under shelves and can lift stacks that weigh up to 750 lbs. They scan bar codes to track items on the shelves and are controlled by digital commands that come from a central computer.

So what’s in this new high-tech center? One of the robots employed by Amazon is Robo-Stow, one of the Earth’s largest robotic arms that will be moving large quantities of inventory. The center also consists of vision systems that can unload an entire trailer of goods in as little as 30 minutes instead of hours.

Robo-Stow. (Image via Amazon.com, Inc.)

According to NBC News, part of the reason for the tech upgrade in its warehouses is due to the many “mishaps that occurred last holiday season when a surge of packages overwhelmed shipping and logistics company UPS and delayed the arrival of Christmas presents around the globe.”

Watch the robots roll around the floors of Amazon's fulfillment center.

On another note, at least these robots won’t be stealing our jobs. The company announced that it has hired 80,000 seasonal employees to fulfill customer order this holiday season and thousands of those employees will stay on full-time when the season is over.