Amazon has lots and lots of warehouses, sorry fulfilment centers, all over the world and they employ lots of humans to find the stuff you buy. The Amazon Picking Challenge is about getting robots to do the same job.
Amazon's fulfilment centers are already interesting from the point of view of computer science. For example, they use a hashing system to place things on shelves. You don't have to search for something alphabetically, you simply compute its hash function and this is the address of the shelf it is sitting on.
In March 2012 Amazon also bought a company that makes warehouse robots, Kiva Systems. These make small trucks which turn shelving into something more mobile. In this case the trucks move any shelf with everything it is storing to a location that needs it - either to load it with new items or to obtain items that have been ordered.
However, for all this automation Amazon still uses human's, pickers, to actually go to the location on a shelf and take one, or however many, of whatever it is you ordered and put the items in a tray on another automatic shelf.
Why?
Because despite it being a seemingly menial job it actually needs all those human senses and effectors that we take for granted.
A machine just isn't up to it - or is it?
link.
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