Press Release

Kiva Systems Deploys 1,000th Autonomous Mobile Robot

Company Establishes Lead in Multi-Vehicle Robotic Systems with Scalable, Flexible Deployments of Hundreds of Robots

Cleveland, Ohio – NA 2008 – April 21, 2008 –Kiva Systems, a developer of breakthrough mobile solutions for the dynamic storage, movement and sortation of inventory, today announced that it has shipped its 1,000th robot and that the aggregate mileage traveled by Kiva’s fleet of robots has taken them well beyond the moon. With implementations of hundreds of mobile-robotic drive units at leading national retailers, Kiva has set new benchmarks for scalable, multi-vehicle robotic systems.

“Kiva Systems is both a pioneer and the leader in large-scale, commercial robotic implementations,” said Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends. “While other robotic companies offer single-robot applications, Kiva has broken the mold by successfully deploying hundreds of robots in a single, viable commercial application that is rewriting the rules for competitive retail fulfillment systems.”

The Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System (KMFS) incorporates distributed intelligence in the design of multi-vehicle swarms of robots that work collectively to perform complex tasks. By organizing the work in parallel processes rather than serial, the KMFS delivers breakthrough—not merely incremental—improvements over generally accepted material handling benchmarks, including installation time, scalability and order picking speed and accuracy.

“Shipping our 1,000th drive unit is more than a milestone—it is validation of the technical architecture, scalability and operational effectiveness of massively-parallel material handling processes,” said Kiva Systems founder and CEO Mick Mountz.

“We were partly inspired by air traffic controllers capable of coordinating the arrivals and departures at a big-city airline hub,” said Raffaello D’Andrea, Kiva Engineering Fellow for Systems Architecture and Professor of Automatic Control at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. “This has allowed us to create a system where inventory organizes itself, adapting to conditions as they change.”

“Our customers now take a mature system for granted, with hundreds of robots working as a team to help warehouse operators fill more orders per hour than ever before,” said Pete Wurman, Kiva Engineering Fellow for Software Architecture. “We anticipate larger and larger implementations with virtually no limit to scale-up capacity.”

Kiva’s innovative approach to order fulfillment with a mobile-robotic solution transforms century-old serial processes to a parallel workflow, whereby all warehouse workers gain real-time random access to any inventory item from a single work station. Kiva robots consistently give retail distribution operators an average pick rate increase of 200 percent, reduce pick error rates by more than 60 percent, and push the order cycle down to minutes from days, as compared to conventional, bolted-down systems.

Large retailers such as Zappos.com, Staples and Walgreens have adopted Kiva in order to achieve a number of high-level strategic objectives, whether building overall corporate agility through flexible and portable warehouses, demonstrating stronger consumer value via faster ship times, or better positioning themselves to accommodate labor scarcity.

Kiva Systems will demonstrate the KMFS in action in their Booth 2200 at NA 2008, where show attendees can use the system to compete for prizes and become the show’s fastest picker.

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