Inside BRS2 Swindon Amazon Robot warehouse

Today I took a trip out to Swindon to take a tour of the Amazon robot warehouse and it was a real eye-opener of efficiency and order.

This isn’t my first my first Amazon tour – back in 2015 I visited their Rugeley Fulfillment Centre but that was more traditional with hundreds of racks and humans walking round with trolleys to collect customer orders. A decade on, and a robot warehouse is nothing like what I saw back then.

Amazon’s drive for endless efficiency starts at the car park. As you enter there are signs commanding you to reverse park (actually the proper way to park, you should never drive forwards into a car park space!). Amazon have a good reason for this though, after a ten hour shift their workers just want to get home and there’s nothing more frustrating than being stuck behind endless cars doing five point turns to reverse out of a parking slot – reverse in, and when 100s of the 2,500 working at Amazon Swindon all pile out to go home everyone gets out that bit quicker!

Inside the Amazon Robot warehouse, blue Hercules robots are barricaded behind wire mesh paneling, not to keep the robots in but to keep the humans out. Any workers that do have to venture in wear special suits with lights and the robots know not to go near them – too close and the robots slow to half speed, even closer and they halt until the human moves.

At one set of stations, goods for sale arrive for workers to pack onto the shelves that the robots bring to their workstation, and again there are signs of Amazon’s efficiency and care for their workers. In the old days, a product would be scanned and then a barcode on the shelf it was placed on would be scanned. This is not only slow, but pressing the scanner button thousands of times a day can cause repetitive strain injuries. So today a product is scanned by camera, and then a bank of cameras scan the shelving and AI figures out which shelf slot it’s been placed into.

And it’s similar at the picking stations – grab a product from the shelf a robot has just parked, scan with camera and pop into a tote ready for it to be transported to the packing stations.

And with maybe 40 slots (4 columns on 10 shelves), how do you know which the product is on? Well it’s simple – a light automatically shines on the appropriate slot for picking. And when choosing a slot to store a product, unsuitable slots are highlighted with purple light and suggested slots with white light. But the worker has the freedom to pick any unlit slot they choose if they deem it more suitable.

At the final packing stations, all the packaging is ready at hand and workers will be told which carton or bag is the most suitable size – or with many single item orders today products will ship in their own packaging and just a bar code needs to be attached.

Once packed, orders go on to a conveyor and this is where the magic happens. The bar codes are scanned and matched up to a courier label on the SLAM (Scan, Label, Apply, and Manifest) conveyer before being whisked away on a conveyor belt some 6km long and dropped via a chute into pallets ready to be loaded and shipped to a particular town for final mile delivery.

(And if you’re wondering by the Amazon Robot warehouse Swindon location is called BRS2, it’s because Amazon fulfillment centres are named after their nearest airport… in this case Bristol. It’s BRS2 because their Avonmouth facility opened first and that was already known as BRS1)

If you want to see around an Amazon Fulfillment Centre, you can book your own trip. It’s free and there are multiple locations around the country to pick from. If you’re an FBA seller, it’s eye opening to see what happens, or if you’re just a curious Amazon customer and fancy a day out, or if you’re thinking of applying to work in an Amazon warehouse, you’ll be just as welcome.