I wonder if they will load the trucks using kiva robots.
I've loaded and unloaded trucks for about a year. Being able to load and unload autonomously would save plenty of time and money.
Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
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Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#32My initial interpretation of the title was that someone at Amazon had managed to purchase truck trailers for Amazon on Amazon.
I interpreted it to mean that Amazon bought trailers they didn't realize they already owned.
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#33I wonder if they will load the trucks using kiva robots. I've loaded and unloaded trucks for about a year. Being able to load and unload autonomously would save plenty of time and money.
First thing I thought when I saw this was autonomous trucks. I think this could be a good way for them to ease into a position where they have enough trucks on the road so they can justify working toward autonomous shipping. Right now they are making huge savings in their warehouse with kiva, I'm sure they want to expand that to other parts of their operation.
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be too worried, yet. There is a lot more to shipping a package from KY to CA than a few trucks.
Well they also have planes and delivery people... It's not that far off. They also have distro centers all over the place so orders frequently come from within a few hours away (or less!) and not a few states away. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-secretive-air-cargo-opera...
Yes. I was going to point out the same thing:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9790916/amazon-air-cargo-...
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think on amazons scale, the number of people buying a good within a large area would have some near term predictability I would imagine. In fact I would be surprised if Amazon does not speculatively dispatch goods ahead of time to local warehouses based on projected demand for orders that have not been placed yet.
They even have a patent for shipping orders to customers before they are anticipated to purchase it (pre-order delivery!). http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/
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Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#36It's been mentioned before (I think I saw it here) but trailers like these would be such a great launch platform for drones. They'd no longer be limited to X miles from the Distribution Center, but could just send relatively few trucks out to strategic locations optimized for that day's deliveries, and let the drones launch from there and automatically deliver. Have battery-swapping robots on the truck too so that yo…
But... how does the truck have the inventory to fulfill whatever is ordered, within 30 minutes? You don't know in advance what "the day's deliveries" are going to be, or where they will be, because the drone deliveries are on-demand.
So this is being implemented already from a local fulfillment center level, sans drones.
The actual mechanisms are actually super straightforward -- basically if a widget X sells Y amounts per day with Z variance in an area, get the low, low end of that to that warehouse/area so you only have to do last-mile delivery.
Then do it with operations research (well, linear algebra) on scale. :)
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think on amazons scale, the number of people buying a good within a large area would have some near term predictability I would imagine. In fact I would be surprised if Amazon does not speculatively dispatch goods ahead of time to local warehouses based on projected demand for orders that have not been placed yet.
They even have a patent for shipping orders to customers before they are anticipated to purchase it (pre-order delivery!). http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/
Whoever dreamed that up was watching minority report.
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#38Meh, no Manac underride guards [1], [2]. [1]: http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-unwraps-new-truck-trailers-j... [2]: http://www.trucknews.com/health-safety/trailer-underride-gua...
Good spot. Maybe you can convince Amazon to add them after the fact, good chance the person rear ending one of their trucks is an Amazon customer.
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#39From people I know in the trucking business, the problem with delivering to Amazon's warehouses is inefficiencies in getting the trucks into and out of the yard. They're just not being run well. Stories of 50-truck-long queues being run off by the local police for blocking entrances to other nearby businesses.. Hopefully this will help, as the trucks can deadhead[0] to their warehouse and do a drop/hook[1], with the…
I have driven by Amazon warehouses before and never seen this happen once. Do you have examples?
Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
But... how does the truck have the inventory to fulfill whatever is ordered, within 30 minutes? You don't know in advance what "the day's deliveries" are going to be, or where they will be, because the drone deliveries are on-demand.
I think on amazons scale, the number of people buying a good within a large area would have some near term predictability I would imagine. In fact I would be surprised if Amazon does not speculatively dispatch goods ahead of time to local warehouses based on projected demand for orders that have not been placed yet.
They already do this within the warehouses, with robot-pallets re-arranging themselves based on a slew of "big data" metrics, the same techniques can be applied forward to determine what to load on the trucks and how to deploy them.