"If you have interesting ideas that have value, they will go to scale at Amazon if we're in any of those businesses," Brady said. The company is known for its regular internal contests and hackathons that recognize people for creative thinking. “I’m always looking for ways to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit among my team and figure out how to weave it into everything we do,” said Brady.Īccording to Brady, anyone at Amazon can contribute an idea that ends up having an impact, even if it's for a different division. But how do you keep driving innovation at a company that's as diversified as Amazon? It's a challenge that remains as stubborn as it is pervasive, and it's one Tye Brady thinks about often in his role as a chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. Amazon values innovation for the long-term, and developing patents to continuously improve its own systems. That idea dovetails with Amazon's Leadership Principles, one of which is "Invent and Simplify." The H Drive is just one example of how Amazon is investing in the process-improving inventions that iterate on existing technology, just as much as its big ideas for new inventions. "And sometimes it's more difficult to design things to be simple versus complex." "Complicated things are not necessarily better than simple things," Pajevic said. The reductions in size will help Amazon open new fulfillment centers closer to urban centers in Europe, resulting in faster delivery to more customers. Assembled in North Reading, Massachusetts, where Amazon Robotics is based, the smaller unit also has improved functionality, making it more efficient at navigating a fulfillment center. Hercules' chassis, or frame, allows parts to sit closer together, taking up less space, while the simpler design makes it easier to build and maintain. Aptly dubbed Hercules, or H Drive for short, the next generation robot can lift 1,250 pounds-500 pounds more than its predecessor. The team of engineers went even further than the initial goal, designing a bot that stands just 7.75 inches high and contains 50 percent fewer components, freeing up significant inventory space.
So designing a smaller bot would in turn open up more space for inventory, making smaller buildings feasible and enabling faster shipping times and better prices for customers. Many fulfillment centers are more than one million square feet – about 28 football fields, making these buildings a fight for space. The first-gen robots are a foot tall, but the goal for the next-gen robots was to cut their height to 9 or 10 inches. There are currently more than 100,000 of these robots working throughout Amazon’s global fulfillment centers.