You have been awed by the sight of Chinese company STO Express Xuzhou’s robots sorting out packages and also saw Amazon’s army of warehouse robots. Now meet the latter’s latest robots, Pegasus drive, at its sortation center in Denver, Colorado. These 2 feet high and 3 feet wide (61 x 91 centimeters) orange robots roll on wheels and each of them is outfitted with a tiny conveyor belt up top reminiscing that of a treadmill. Here’s out Pegasus drive works:
“It rolls up to a station where an associate on the other side of a barrier fence scans a package, places it on the robot, and off it goes – navigating a “robot highway” inside the Denver sortation center. On-board cameras sense any surprise obstacles as the unit follows its programmed journey to an eject station. The conveyor moves the package off the unit and down the chute where it’s then readied for delivery. The robot completes its entire journey in roughly two minutes.”
The movement and operation of these hardworking, non-complaining robots are monitored by a small team of flow control specialists. Amazon’s Denver sortation center started using the robots in October 2018 and since then, they traveled over 1.5 million miles combined. Denver is just the beginning. Other sortation centers in the U.S. will get these high-tech sorting robots this year.
Images: Amazon/Jordan Stead.
