How robots are building Amazon’s future

It was early 2002, and Mick Mountz’s mind was occupied with one question: Is there a way to make warehouse operations faster? From 1999 to 2001, Mountz was working at Webvan, an online grocery shop, one of many online businesses created during the dot-com bubble and one of its many victims when the bubble burst in the early 2000s. As the business process director for logistics, Mountz was acutely aware of one fact — Webvan’s cost of fulfilling orders ran three times as high as what the business plan had estimated. After coming up with idea after idea, Mountz eventually came to the conclusion that the answer was robots. A lot of robots. He then called up his former roommate from MIT, Peter Wurman, to find out what kind of software would be needed to orchestrate so many robots. Together, they came up with a system which then they tested in a simulation. The results were amazing: their system performed better than any real warehouse. On 15 July 2002, Mountz filed <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US6950722B2/en" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">U.S. Patent №6950722</a> and later founded Distrobot Systems to make this vision of a fleet of small robots zooming around a warehouse a reality. <a href="https://medium.com/predict/how-robots-are-building-amazons-future-2391246067f4">Read More</a>