Coordinating Hundreds of Cooperative, Autonomous Vehicles in Warehouses

The Kiva warehouse-management system creates a new paradigm for pick-pack-and-ship warehouses that significantly improves worker productivity. The Kiva system uses movable storage shelves that can be lifted by small, autonomous robots. A Kiva installation for a large distribution center may require 500 or more vehicles. As such, the Kiva system represents the first commercially available, large-scale autonomous robot system.