Amazon's warehouse robots grew from its 2012 purchase of which robotics maker?

Kiva Systems built the squat, shelf-carrying robots that navigate warehouse floors by reading floor codes and lifting entire storage pods up to human pickers, rather than making workers walk to the shelves themselves. Amazon's 2012 acquisition let it fold this technology into its own operations, rebranding it Amazon Robotics and scaling it across an enormous fleet.

Pixar Studios makes animated movies and Dolby Labs is known for audio and cinema sound technology, neither builds warehouse robots, so both are simply unrelated companies plugged into the question as distractors.

By bringing goods to workers instead of workers to goods, this "goods-to-person" design cut the walking time that used to eat up a huge share of a warehouse picker's shift, one of the biggest efficiency gains in modern e-commerce logistics.