It sounds a bit spooky, but once Amazon’s new Barrhaven facility is fully staffed, the warehouse’s 5,000 robots will outnumber employees by about two to one.
The imposing warehouse, located in the Citigate Business Park near Fallowfield Road and Hwy. 416, boasts more than 2.6 million square feet across four levels and is the most technologically advanced Amazon facility in Canada and one of only four such Amazon facilities across the globe. It will bring approximately 2,500 jobs to the area, but also employs the company’s most cutting-edge robots designed to improve employee safety and productivity.
The building has a footprint of 450,000 square feet and is designed to handle more than 100,000 packages a day and store up to 20 million items at a time. The building was completed last year at a cost of $200 million and will serve as a key distribution hub for Amazon.
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OBJ went inside for a sneak peek at just a few of the robots and automated technologies being deployed, alongside their human counterparts.
H DRIVES
The H stands for Hercules and these robots, which look like oversized Roombas, more than live up to the mythological name. H Drives do the heavy lifting at most Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centres. In service since 2012, they aren’t the newest robots on the block but they are the most dramatic and ubiquitous. How so? Well, Amazon employees don’t comb the aisles for products. Instead, these semi-autonomous worker-bots scoot beneath a shelving “pod,” hoist it slightly off the ground and ferry it to the waiting employee. That’s right, the shelves move so that the workers don’t have to. Up to 4,000 H Drive robots transform the expansive warehouse floor into a fluid labyrinth of constantly shifting shelving pods.
ROBIN
The facility’s 24 Robin robotic arms enjoy two distinctions. They put in the longest hours, working up to 22 hours per day, and are the only Amazon robots of their kind in Canada. These agile robotic arms can grab, manipulate and sort packages with minimal human supervision. Five cameras, advanced grips, and sophisticated AI allow the robot to gather information and make decisions about a package in a matter of seconds. The facility’s two dozen Robin robots are directly monitored by six employees and indirectly supported by a team of 12 workers. The Robins also work with a fleet of 950 Pegasus Drive robots that gather the Robin-sorted packages and transport them to shoots, which will guide them on to the delivery stage.
RWC4 ROBOTIC ARM
From its name, this automated armature might seem like one of those eccentric little droids from the Star Wars universe. Instead, RWC4 is the muscle of the robot team, sorting and building pallets of totes for shipment between Amazon facilities. Customers prefer to receive their entire order in a single package and RWC4’s speed and efficiency help make that possible. The facility has 25 RWC4s. Each is directly monitored by one employee and can sort and build pallets six to 10 times faster than humans. This makes more efficient use of floor space and spares workers the laborious tasks of hoisting and sorting heavy totes.
KERMIT
Amazon rolled out this automated trolley technology in the spring of 2021. The new Barrhaven facility sports 12 km of conveyor belts that shuttle yellow totes of merchandise or packages through the stages of packing, sorting and shipping. But what happens to the yellow bins that transport merchandise within or between Amazon facilities? That’s where the Kermit robots come in, acting like a trolley service, hauling yellow totes from places where they are no longer needed, to places where they are. Like a regular trolley, it follows a track, navigating a network of magnetic tape on the floor. Unlike a regular trolley, Kermit has no human driver. Instead, sensors allow it to navigate “decision points,” or intersections of the magnetic tape. In Barrhaven, 10 Kermits keep the totes moving on time.
