Robots delivering the goods for Amazon at Kemps Creek fulfilment centre
The robots are already whizzing around Amazon’s first robotics fulfilment centre in the southern hemisphere, at Kemps Creek in western Sydney.
The robots are already whizzing around Amazon’s first robotics fulfilment centre in the southern hemisphere. It’s a huge warehouse where Amazon receives goods from manufacturers and distributors, stores them, and retrieves them to send to customers. Here, the storing and retrieving is done by the robots.
The Australian this week toured the centre at the Goodman Oakdale West Industrial Estate at Kemps Creek, western Sydney, to see the robots in action.
We humans are kept away from the robots. They are not like the Daleks. You won’t be attacked. But if you stray into their area, robotic operations shut down to avoid you being mowed down. They are disk-shaped objects that skate across the floor carrying large shelving structures full of product goodies.
Amazon Australia principal program manager Luke Rector said the Kemps Creek location was just 12 hours’ drive from 80 per cent of Australia’s population. That’s anywhere from north of Brisbane to Melbourne along the eastern seaboard.
“It took 18 months to get us to this point,” Mr Rector said. “We’re at the point of testing and commissioning and getting ready to go live in the early part of next year.”
Amazon’s newest fulfilment centre is huge by its own standards. It’s more than four times the size of the tech giant’s existing Sydney warehouse at Moorebank, which itself is compared to the size of six football fields.
Mr Rector compared the new 200,000sq m centre comprising four levels to the land size of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo. It’s double the land size of Bondi Beach, and the size of 24 rugby league fields. It will be the company’s sixth fulfilment centre in Australia.
Mr Rector said it was the largest warehouse built in Australia. “Predominantly this building will fulfil small to medium-sized products,” he said.
“It won’t fulfil your larger TVs but it will fulfil your phones, your teddy bears, your Lego sets.”
The statistics around this centre are staggering. Robot vehicles will move 37,000 yellow storage pods around the warehouse, which overall will store up to 20 million items sold on amazon.com.au.
The building comprises 13,500 tonnes of locally made steel, 3000 tonnes more steel than was used for Sydney’s Olympic stadium. More than 200,000 nuts and bolts were used for installation. The centre includes about 14km of advanced conveyancing equipment.
Mr Rector said the Kemps Creek centre would be managed from the cloud. The cloud system links to a server in the warehouse that Mr Rector described as “the brains” of the system. It runs day-to-day operations.
The robotics system used at the Kemps Creek centre will not be the same as used in some other robotic centres. Perry Deu, Amazon’s robotic deployment engineering manager who is in Australia to implement the robotics system, said Amazon had used different robotic models at different locations.
In the case of the Kemps Creek warehouse, delivered goods are manually placed into the yellow storage pods, which are put onto conveyor belts and dispatched to one of three automated floors.
The system assigns a shelf to the stock item and a robot retrieves the shelving and brings it to a human operator, who then places the yellow storage pod onto a shelf. The robot then takes the shelving away for storage.
Mr Deu said robots did not pick items from shelves, as occurred at some other automated fulfilment centres. The process is reversed when a sale is made and an item is retrieved for delivery.
“Previously in a manual environment one would have to walk deeply into the field,” Mr Deu said. “The robots are going into the field, they are picking up the shelf which has the product that the customer ordered, and they’re bringing the shelf to the human who works in a more ergonomic environment.”
Amazon argues that the robots do not need to create spaces between the stored shelving units that humans would need. Mr Rector said this increased the density of storage and the warehouse capacity by more than 50 per cent.
Mr Rector said the site would create more than 1500 jobs ranging from IT, engineers, HR and robotics professionals, to pickers, packers and stowers.
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