Kiva Systems Deploys 1,000th Autonomous Mobile Robot

Kiva Systems, a developer of mobile solutions for the dynamic storage, movement and sortation of inventory, has announced that it has shipped its 1,000th robot.

“Kiva Systems is both a pioneer and the leader in large-scale, commercial robotic implementations,” said Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends. “While other robotic companies offer single-robot applications, Kiva has broken the mold by successfully deploying hundreds of robots in a single, viable commercial application that is rewriting the rules for competitive retail fulfillment systems.”

“Shipping our 1,000th drive unit is more than a milestone - it is validation of the technical architecture, scalability and operational effectiveness of massively-parallel material handling processes,” said Kiva Systems founder and CEO Mick Mountz.

“We were partly inspired by air traffic controllers capable of coordinating the arrivals and departures at a big-city airline hub,” said Raffaello D’Andrea, Kiva Engineering Fellow for Systems Architecture and Professor of Automatic Control at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. “This has allowed us to create a system where inventory organizes itself, adapting to conditions as they change.”

“Our customers now take a mature system for granted, with hundreds of robots working as a team to help warehouse operators fill more orders per hour than ever before,” said Pete Wurman, Kiva Engineering Fellow for Software Architecture. “We anticipate larger and larger implementations with virtually no limit to scale-up capacity.”