Inside an Amazon facility near Stone Mountain, multiple floors are full of robots that busily move about, bringing racks of packages to workers to sort. Robots like these are a key tool Amazon uses to handle demand for millions of packages over the holiday season.
The Stone Mountain fulfillment center is one of many around its network, including another in Savannah, that rely heavily on robotics to sort products to be packaged and delivered.
Opened in 2020, the Stone Mountain fulfillment center was the first in Georgia to use the robotics technology, and now has more than 3,000 employees. It’s one of the top 10 buildings in the world for items shipped out for Amazon, handling about 600,000 packages a day, with even more during the holiday season, according to Tony Vozzolo, site lead at the Amazon facility in Stone Mountain.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This week is a particularly busy time for Amazon, when it offers Black Friday week deals on everything from toys to clothes, Christmas trees, kitchen appliances and tech devices. Another round of sales starts immediately after for the lead-up to Cyber Monday. Amazon said it has hired about 12,000 seasonal workers in Georgia, including about 8,000 in Atlanta, ahead of the busy holiday shipping season.
The fulfillment center begins moving goods when a customer places an order, packaging products to be shipped out to a delivery center, where the packages are loaded onto a truck and then delivered to the customer. The Stone Mountain building is open 24 hours a day, handling products ranging from gummy bears to DVDs to dog food.
With multiple fulfillment centers in the Southeast, the goal is “really trying to get the product that customers are using the most in that area,” Vozzolo said.
Robots whir on three floors of the massive Stone Mountain facility, connected through conveyor belts to the bottom 640,000-square-foot level that has a more standard fulfillment operation with employees packaging and moving goods.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the robotics area, small, blue autonomous gizmos called Hercules robots go underneath yellow racks of goods to move them to workers, guided by stickers on the floor. Then, workers at hundreds of stations on the perimeter of the robotic area load and unload items on the racks, with scanners built into the station.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When a robot needs to be serviced or an item falls onto the ground in the robotic area, a worker can stop the robots or safely move around in the robotic area by wearing a specialized vest that signals to the machines to move away.
Amazon’s roots in robotics stretch back to 2012, when it acquired shipping technology firm Kiva Systems. In the years since then, Amazon has deployed more than 750,000 mobile robots around the world.
Before the deployment of those robots, employees at fulfillment centers “were walking a lot all day long, because they were walking through these million square foot facilities, multiple levels high, and they were walking to all of these different shelves to pick and stow product,” Vozzolo said. “Today, the robots bring the work” to people, which he said reduces walking time and reduces ergonomic strains.
“We’re one of the top producing buildings in the network,” he said. “As we gear up for the holiday season … that will go up.”
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