Amazon Robotics

Amazon's warehouse robotics division, evolved from Kiva Systems, now running a fleet of more than a million robots.

Amazon Robotics grew out of Kiva Systems, founded in 2003 by Mick Mountz, Peter Wurman, and Raffaello D'Andrea. Kiva's orange carts drove underneath shelving units and carried the whole shelf to a picker, flipping 'person goes to the goods' into 'goods come to the person.' Amazon acquired Kiva for $775 million in 2012 and renamed it Amazon Robotics in 2015; it is headquartered in Massachusetts. Amazon has since rolled out Proteus, a mobile robot that can navigate autonomously around people, Hercules, which carries shelving units, and Vulcan, a picking robot with a sense of touch, among others. By 2025 Amazon had deployed more than a million robots across more than 300 facilities, and also released DeepFleet, a generative foundation model that routes the whole fleet's movement, which the company says improved travel efficiency by about 10%. Amazon Robotics represents specialized warehouse automation already deployed at massive scale, a useful point of comparison against the general-purpose humanoid robot approach.

ExampleVulcan uses force sensing to push aside other items inside a shelf bin crammed with goods, completing both stowing and picking.

Also called

Kiva Systems

Related

Amazon Vulcan · Autonomous Mobile Robot · Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics · Covariant · Agility Robotics · Fleet Management System (e.g. Open-RMF)

Sources

Amazon Robotics - Wikipedia
Amazon launches a new AI foundation model to power its robotic fleet and deploys its 1 millionth robot

As of

2025-07