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Amazon shows off the robots handling your holiday orders
Amazon gets a lot of orders during the holidays -- enough that shipping companies sometimes buckle under the load. How's it supposed to cope this year? With robots, apparently. The online shopping giant has revealed that its newest wave of US fulfillment centers make heavy use of automatons to ship your order on time. Kiva robots (the little machines you see above) are around to shuttle smaller goods around the warehouse, while Robo-Stow arms move the larger volumes. There are also shiny new vision-based systems that help workers unload a trailer's worth of stock in 30 minutes, rather than hours. While humans will still play an important role (Amazon will need 80,000 of them this season), they'll hopefully have an easier time dealing with the crushing demand.
