Entrepreneur Mick Mountz knew first-hand of the challenges faced by large distributors when it came to order fulfillment and inventory management. During his tenure at Webvan, an online grocer, he experienced the over-complexity of the equipment, the difficulty of keeping track of staff and inventory in a large warehouse and the challenges of maintaining a productive workflow in an environment of custom orders and fluctuating markets. Ultimately Webvan failed, but his experience at the online distributor had given Mountz an idea:
"What if all the products in the warehouse could walk and talk on their own? Couldn't they just come to me when I need to fill an order?"
Mountz envisioned a fleet of intelligent robots moving efficiently about a warehouse. The idea was revolutionary, but to pursue it Mountz needed to prove to investors that his vision was a plausible one.
Then one day he discovered a video clip on the Internet depicting a fleet of soccer-playing robots. If robots can play soccer, he reasoned to angel investors, surely they can deliver a widget to a packing station. His investors bought in, fertilizing the seed of what would grow to become Kiva Systems.
Now Mountz needed to find the people who could bring his vision through R&D to the point that venture capital could be raised. And what better place to start looking than the very mind behind the robotic soccer team that had won the confidence of his angel investors?
Raffaello D’Andrea, then associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University and the leader behind Cornell’s championship robotic soccer team, was about to take a sabbatical leave at MIT. Excited by the opportunity, he changed his plans and decided to take his leave with Mountz instead. Peter Wurman - professor of computer science at North Carolina State University and co-director of the university's e-commerce program - also joined the team, and the three became Kiva’s founding members.
To realize Mountz’ vision, Wurman and D’Andrea applied the concept of distributed intelligence to inventory management. Inspired by air traffic controllers capable of coordinating the arrivals and departures of a big-city hub, they created a system that allows inventory to organize itself, adapting to conditions as they change. D’Andrea and Wurman’s powerful software uses a fleet of intelligent robotic drive units to shuttle inventory between storage areas and workers at picking, packing and shipping stations, eliminating the need for workers to go to the inventory themselves.
Kiva Systems Drive Units
Widely respected for his research and practical application of Internet and e-commerce technologies, Wurman oversaw the architecture of Kiva's host control material handling software platform and the creation of the resource algorithms that drive the system’s various modules.
D’Andrea oversaw the overall system architecture, the design of the autonomous vehicles, and developed the algorithms that allow the vehicles to safely navigate the warehouse and perform more efficiently over time by sharing information with each other.
The result is an incredibly efficient, accurate and flexible distribution chain with no single point of failure. In use by distribution giants like Walgreens and Staples, Kiva’s ‘intelligent warehouse’ is helping distributors fill two to three times as many orders as they could with conventional methods.
D’Andrea has eight patents and patents pending with Kiva Systems, and many of his former students are now part of the Kiva team.
Kiva Systems on Daily Planet, Discovery Channel, 2006.
Warehouse Robots
