What dreams of orange carts

Large online store. Tens of millions of items.
Have you ever thought about how to build an order?

While the guys in Google are filling the bus with basketball balls, think about what area a warehouse should have to place a stock of amazon.com or ozon.ru. A small order of two books, a board game and a set of pencils can be collected by a warehouse worker, spending from 10 minutes to an hour - after all, nobody has guaranteed all the names on the neighboring shelves.
Those interested can analyze the expectation of the average order assembly time.
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Go ahead. Psychologists spend a lot of resources on asking questions about how does operator fatigue affect the order assembly time? How much the assembly time of the same order varies depending on the change of collectors, time of year or other "human factors"? This is the science that is supposed to influence practice. But while science is trying to improve real life, online store owners are striving to reduce their costs and are closely watching interesting ideas in this market. The creators of the startup kivasystems.com decided to make life easier for shop owners (by reducing their costs) and customers (minimizing the amount of time and errors in collecting orders). And they succeeded in their decision - especially considering the futuristic fact that robots are now working in warehouses.

Meet these orange trolleys — warehouse workers at Amazon, GAP, Diapers, Office Depot, and dozens of American online stores. They communicate via Wi-Fi and are oriented with the help of a scanner using two-dimensional bar-codes applied to the floor of the warehouse. Operators-people do not move around the warehouse at all. All operations, such as stock replenishment, order assembly, inventory of the product group, order return and other robots are used. The small size allows them to drive up to the desired rack, lift it and deliver it to the operator. Empty carts can travel anywhere — the bottom shelf of the racks is higher than the vertical size of the carriage, and it can travel under them, and the loaded robots drive between the aisles.

Of course, it is desirable to have and observe the priority direction of movement on each "street". Otherwise, traffic jams can not be avoided. Robots also know how to ride an elevator - this is necessary for a multi-level warehouse. Even the robots need to be fed - in the warehouse there are recharging zones. Robots visit them when the battery level drops below the set level. The main thing is to prevent an unprepared person from entering the warehouse, otherwise the spectacle is guaranteed to be fantastic.

ZY Anticipating questions about why I wrote about all this. First, because it seemed to me quite interesting. Secondly, I wanted to open a small window into the modern world of e-commerce. And thirdly (and the most interesting), in Moscow there is one of the groups of developers. We are looking for several Java developers. If you are fluent in Java, you can communicate in English, know classical algorithms and are interested in the work of a programmer in Moscow, write maria.kasyanova@auriga.com