Amazon’s steady march toward robotization
Amazon has announced the acquisition of Cloostermans, a family-run Belgian automation and mechatronics company founded in 1884, whose services it had been using since 2019. The company’s 200 or so employees will now become part of Amazon Robotics, which was formed following the acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012.
Robotics is essential for Amazon’s future. Warehouse logistics operations are one type of task that the company has long sought to automate. The company has a range of warehouses for different aspects of its operations, and at different stages of technological maturity: some that are still largely manual with pickers and packers moving between thousands of shelves and miles of conveyor belts, while others are much more automated with large areas off-limits to personnel and where robots move shelves loaded with products between fluid maps in which aisles appear and disappear measured to the exact size for the robots and their cargo to pass, but which would make it impossible to cross paths with a human being.
