| Hmm.. don't know why asking a question deserves a downvote. I think you're right that it would be more energy efficient -- since a human weighs less than a rack full of goods. But energy, compared to the other costs, is a fairly small component of costs. The bigger question is whether a person is cheaper than a machine. A few years ago before Amazon bought Kiva, they would sell a complete setup for a large warehouse for $15-20m for 1000 robots. This included a lot of setup, but even if we assume it's just 20m/1000 robots = $20,000 each. So for $20,000 you can get a robot that will work 24/7 for a few years. Lets pretend the kiva robots are completely junk after 3 years. That's under $7000/yr. Obviously, that's going to be tough to beat with a human. But for comparison, lets assume a person gets paid federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr), there's no overhead, no management, healthcare, never gets sick, etc. That equals $15000/year. But that's only for 40 hours a week x 52 weeks/year. So really, we'll need 3 people.. so $45000/year. (EDIT: I forgot about weekends, which is another 48 hours. So really, we need 4 people, or $60,000/year.) Considering that humans are so much more expensive than a kiva robot, the increased energy compared to segways doesn't really effect the outcome. It's clearly cheaper to use robots and simply pay for the increased energy usage. |