Inside Amazon's new 'super-sized' robotic warehouse

Written By Warehouse Automation

When Amazon's mega-warehouse on Boxwood Road near Newport stowed its first product last week – a plush dog toy – it became the largest operational Amazon facility in the country.

“The size is huge.”
— Qadir Stevenson - Amazon site manager.

Covering roughly 640,000 square feet of ground space and five stories high, the new warehouse totals 3.8 million square feet, making it more than three times the size of Amazon's Middletown fulfillment center.

But it's not just the size that sets the Boxwood Road facility apart. The fulfillment center features all of Amazon's latest technology, including robots that move products miles every day and sensors that detect when and where a product is stowed.

Amazon invited media on a tour of the facility Tuesday afternoon. Here's what we saw.

1. How does it work?

Nothing is manufactured at the Boxwood Road facility.

Amazon sellers send products to the warehouse where they are stored and eventually packaged for delivery to customers. The game is getting products from one point to another as efficiently as possible.

The first station products are sent to once they arrive at the warehouse is "decont," or decontainer. There, employees put products into yellow totes, which are then sent to different points across the five-story building via a winding series of conveyor belts.

The totes arrive at a stowing station where an employee puts each item into a "robotics pod." The pod looks like a large shelving unit with about a dozen small compartments on each face.

The products stowed in the robotics pods range anywhere from makeup to over-the-counter medicine and LED stripe lights. It's at this point the products appear as available on Amazon.com.

At similar looking stations, employees pick items from the pods to fulfill online orders and place them in totes that are sent elsewhere to be packaged and delivered.

The company has a device called an AFE or Amazon fulfillment engine that allows multiple products to be packaged in the same box. Amazon officials did not explain the process, citing proprietary reasons.

The Boxwood Road facility sends packages to sortation centers, which sort the packages for delivery by zip code. Packages are then sent to delivery stations, which handle the "last mile" of the process to the customer's front door.

At the back of the Boxwood Road property Amazon built a second smaller building that serves as a delivery station.

2. Robots? What do the robots do?

The upper four floors are where the robots live. They look like oversized Roomba vacuum cleaners and transport roughly 40,000 robotics pods across the facility (10,000 fit on a floor).

The robots move along a series of "alleys and roads" to the 128 stations on each floor manned by human employees. The robots are sent back and forth to the employee stations by a computer system.

At the stations, employees are bound by a wall of totes and a computer screen to one side and the robotics pod – that shelving unit of various products – to the other. Each station is dedicated to one purpose. They either store products, pick products from storage for delivery or count products to maintain an accurate inventory.

When they aren't in use, the robotics pods are returned to their spots in a perfectly formed grid covering thousands of square feet of dimly lit floor space. The robotics pods are surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Amazon touts its robotics system as a win for employee safety. It also makes the operation more efficient. Employees don't spend their day walking through shelves as though they're stocking or shopping at a massive store. The would-be shelving units can hold items on all four sides, not just the one facing outward.

3. Other technology and observations

The stowing stations at the facility have a vertical light filter that detects when an employee reaches their hand into the robotics pod where products are stored.

In tandem with the computer system, which directs where products are moving from and to, the system allows stowers to sort products without having to scan each one before moving them. The containers also sense the weight of the product. The light filter was not shown to media.

Most of the interior of the facility was gray with yellow accenting. With no windows, it was all subject to the white glow of the overhead LED light panels. The parts of the warehouse shown to media were quiet.

4. Working at Amazon

Amazon has hired about 500 people for the Boxwood Road facility. It expects to hire about 500 more workers before the end of the year. Officials are also aiming for the facility to be fully operational at that time.

The stowers and pickers whose work was observed by reporters work 10- or 12-hour shifts, said General Manager Will Carney.

The minimum wage for the site on a per-hour basis is $16.25, and employees can receive a sign-on bonus of up to $3,000. Other benefits include a 401(k) savings plan and a college tuition program.

5. Amazon has history with Delaware

Amazon opened its first fulfillment center some 24 years ago in Delaware.

Still active today, the fulfillment center off Frenchtown Road near New Castle is smaller than the size of one floor of the new Boxwood Road facility.

Amazon has at least eight facilities planned or opened in the First State, according to media reports. They include plans for a new fulfillment center at the former Blue Diamond Park on Hamburg Road near New Castle and delivery stations in Delaware City and Seaford.

Inside Amazon's largest warehouse - where you'll find 10 robots for every human

STANTON, Del. — Amazon’s biggest, newest warehouse, with more robots than ever, brings America closer to an automated future when machines do all the work of moving everything from groceries to laptops, from makers to users. And do it faster.

While Amazon has been building increasingly automated warehouses since opening its first satellite center in 1997, five miles down the road in New Castle, Del., this $250 million showcase is something entirely different.

Insides the five-story plant — as big as 17 football fields, or four of Philadelphia’s tallest high rises — an electromechanical ballet performed by robots takes place in an eerie quiet. Robot vehicles, guided by optical and motion sensors, make turns tightly adjacent to one another, selecting and carrying Amazon’s vast array of merchandise from storage to delivery.

There are still workers unloading trucks from suppliers and stowing the contents — not in vast shelves for hands to grab but in eight-foot-tall stacks of square yellow bins. Once within these, goods begin their robotic travels.

Hour after hour, tireless robots seize the stacks and move them across the vast floors, dutifully pausing before isolated checkers, flesh, and blood, who wave electronics devices to verify the orders. Finally, workers pack the sorted goods onto conveyors to carry them to loaders for delivery.

And Amazon is developing drones and self-driving vehicles to speed those last steps.

Rival shippers such as FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service, big grocery chains, and upstart deliverers such as Philadelphia’s Gopuff have also been speeding up their warehouses. But Amazon’s massive investment will force its competitors to invest a lot more, a lot faster, analysts predict.

About 10,000 Amazon-built robots here far outnumber the 1,000 newly hired human workers who spend 10- to 12- hour shifts at the 3.7 million-square foot complex, which Amazon contractors erected on the site of a former General Motors factory.

Does that 10-1 ratio spell an end to the massive hiring that has made warehouse work at double the minimum wage so widely available in recent years?

Amazon and its admirers are a little sensitive on this point, so it’s worth noting upfront: Amazon is still hiring, not just because so many workers don’t last a year, but also because its service is so popular that it keeps building more centers, adding people to run them, doing things robots still can’t. For now.

Amazon employed 1.3 million employees worldwide last year, up from 800,000 a year earlier. Among U.S. companies, only rival Walmart, with all its stores, employs more.

To be sure, some critical economists say Amazon destroys more jobs than it creates. Other analysts say that labor-saving has always been the goal of new technology.

In any event, Will Carney, the plant’s manager here, said, “Our hiring is not quite done.”

The facility is in a “ramp-up” stage, and may eventually employ as many as 4,000 to 5,000 workers, as the work expands over the next several years, according to spokesman Steve Kelly.

Amazon hopes it will be easier to keep human workers this winter, when the company has pledged to start providing workers up to $5,250 a year toward colleges costs. It may also add robots and employees in Delaware, though Amazon won’t detail its longer-term plans for the facility.

An Amazon truck drives in in Philadelphia, Friday, April 30, 2021. Amazon wants to hire 125,000 delivery and warehouse workers and said Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021 that it is paying new hires an average of $18 an hour in a tight job market as more people shop online. The company is also offering pay sign-on bonuses of $3,000 in some parts of the country. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The staff, as much as it has grown since opening this summer, is still fewer than Amazon employs at fulfillment centers one-quarter this size.

The facility is the flagship of a sweeping expansion by Amazon across the Philadelphia region. Amazon has plans to open as many as nine new facilities in the coming months. That’s on top of the 14 sites added last year across Philadelphia and its suburbs, the Lehigh Valley, South Jersey, and northern Delaware.

In all, Amazon now has more than 57 centers up and running or underway across this greater Philadelphia region. Real estate and industry analysts call the growth unprecedented.

Still, here in Stanton, Amazon is no replacement for the former GM plant, where then-Sen. Joe Biden used to launch his political campaigns, glad-handling the union workers.

Built amid farm fields in 1946, the old plant employed at its peak as many as 5,000 United Auto Workers members who built Oldsmobiles, Chevettes and, toward the end, Saturns, before the last workers were let go in 2009 as a recession-wracked GM reined in production.

A Biden-backed proposal to build electric cars fizzled after burning through more than $200 million in state and federal subsidies.

Manufacturers add value, and GM paid well; distribution of goods made somewhere else was historically a lot less lucrative. The GM plant, along with a nearby Chrysler factory, a DuPont paint complex, and a Claymont Steel works underpinned a prosperous post-World War II American manufacturing economy. All four are closed.

Despite Amazon’s recent bump in pay up to $18 an hour — $3 more than Amazon projected two years ago when it announced its plan — the nonunion Amazon workers make less than GM workers did when the plant closed. (Less than half as much, adjusted for inflation.)

As wages creep up, Amazon has relentlessly focused on consolidating operations and speeding deliveries.

“This is just the beginning. You will see large centers like this throughout the country,” with other supersized facilities already rising in California, New York, Virginia, and Arkansas, said Subodha Kumar, a professor at Temple University’s business school and an expert on supply chains and information systems.

Robots make it easier to manage inventory, speeding the deliveries from Amazon’s smaller distribution centers in such cities as Philadelphia, said Kumar. Amazon now guarantees two-hour deliveries in many locations.

“They want 30 minutes,” he said. “They have plans to go shorter than that, if they can.”

Amazon said automation frees workers from dull, repetitive tasks. But workers have complained that automated production has been accompanied by speed-ups and a higher-than-average rate of injuries.

Why Delaware? It helps that the state gave the company, whose profits top $2 billion a month, about $4.5 million in up-front aid, while the local government cut realty taxes to a fraction of what GM paid. Wilmington’s proximity to workforces in Maryland, New Jersey, and Philadelphia’s southern suburbs helped, too.

“They try to find locations they can run at lower cost,” Kumar said.

(Amazon officials say the plant’s proximity to the Port of Wilmington, airports, and on-site railroad sidings don’t matter, since cargo goes in and out by truck.)

“In the long run, if they are not going to innovate and automate, they will not survive,” said Temple’s Kumar. “Amazon is moving very fast.”

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