Robot-Run Warehouse Speeds Deliveries 142
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The robot invasion may soon be coming to a warehouse near you. In a conventional warehouse, workers walk from shelf to shelf to fill orders, while in conveyor-based systems, boxes move past workers who pack them. A new warehouse design arranges rows and columns of freestanding shelves in a memory-chip-like grid serviced by robots. When a consumer submits an order, robots deliver the relevant shelving units to workers who pack the requested items in a box and ship them off allowing workers to fill orders two to three times faster than they could with conventional methods because the robots can work in parallel, allowing dozens of workers to fill dozens of orders simultaneously. The robotic system is also faster because the entire warehouse can adapt, in real time, to changes in demand by having the robots move shelves with popular items closer to the workers (pdf), where the shelves can be quickly retrieved while items that aren't selling are gradually moved farther away. Two giant warehouses have already been built for Staples and a third is being built for Walgreens where the software will also keep track of expiration dates to ensure that items that can go bad are sent out in the order that they're stocked."
why is this news (Score:1, Informative)
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"temps" (Score:1)
already exists in one form... (Score:2, Interesting)
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That's about $90k in salary (on average) not counting benefits and employment taxes.
Seems like the machine is an investment with ~5% return. Better than inflation, but possibly not better than the loan you'd use to purchase it. Also, if it only replaces the temps, it's even less of a return.
At those prices, I don't think I'd have rejected the system outright. I'd really need to do the further investigation to see if it's worth it, and the first price quoted
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This is news, because someone found a way to collect the money?
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Yes.. In semiconductor manufacturing
http://www.asyst.com/products/fsol/amhs/amhs.asp [asyst.com]
in food production
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3846/is_200307/ai_n9282236 [findarticles.com]
http://www.pbase.com/four12/image/46413392 [pbase.com]
The toiling continues. To handle the growth, TCCA opened a new manufacturing plant two years ago in Boardman, east of Portland along the Columbia River, and completed an automatic storage and retrieval system (ASRS) at the Tillamoo
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Very promising. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been waiting for quite some time for industrial use of robots to go beyond stationary machines that weld or cut parts, obviously there are other things that robots are used for today but something like this might actually appeal to a lot of companies that are what you might call "conservative" when it comes to automation.
Because let's be honest, wouldn't we love to live in a world where all almost all menial labour is performed by automated machines with only a handful of skilled experts controlling the machines? I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want. If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants.
One problem with this "utopia" (Although Utopia as described in the book wasn't what most people think of when they hear the word) is support functions such as technical support and customer services, people are still going to have problems getting their DSL working and someone will have to help them with that. Oh well, it's a nice dream anyway, a technocratic utopia in which no one is forced to work a boring mundane job unless they want to..
/Mikael (dreamer)
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Re:Very promising. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true. However, one interesting detail here is that in the past there have been examples of factories planning to automate parts of the production of various products which has resulted in massive protests from workers and local authorities afraid of mass unemployment. The end result of this of course being that the people in charge have been convinced in various ways (tax subsidies etc..) to hold back on automation.
This is probably the biggest problem with moving society to a state of "techno-utopia", that the transition could land a lot of people unemployed and unable to support themselves until the transition is over. I don't have a solution to this problem and until someone comes up with one I suspect we won't be hearing about people buying and selling things using energy credits instead of dollars and euros. :/
/Mikael
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Hunters-gatherers had to work from dawn to dusk just to survive.
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That may be the number of hours that you are on somebody's clock getting paid with money (although 35 hours/week is a very low estimate). But yYou have to add in commuting, shopping, cooking, caring for children, and repairing your house and car (often on the weekends). These forms of work are perhaps closer to prehistoric work, because you are doing diverse activities to pro
I did this! (Score:1)
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As long as we have money, people (and especially companies) will want to make more. That means that given the choice between earning the same and working less, or earning more and working the same, while some individuals may
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Automation benefits the infrastructure owners because they can produce more value with fewer employees. T
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The reality is that we're at the point *now* where only about 3% of the population has to work to meet our needs. The rest is about figuring out how best to dist
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That depends. I have a couple of friends who do have a fair amount of leisure time. They work part-time by choice, about 15-20 hours per week, in fairly low-paying jobs. They make enough to cover the rent, food and bills, and have a bit left over for entertainment.
They don't have *that* much left over; they don't have plasma TVs or huge CD/DVD collections, and they don't need to maintain a car due to a) a decent and relatively inexpensive public transport system in
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This Is Because of Immigration Laws (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't really look at Mexicans as merely cheap labor, I'm just speaking in very frank terms of what anti-immigration laws and fence building are going to do to us.
If you are still productive from the result of a robot and the person who used to have that job can now go to school, I only see more skilled workers in the workforce. People aren't as stupid as you think they are, they just haven't had a chance to go to school. There may be a generation or two that adapt badly to this new model but I welcome the future where a farming family's children now have the option to go to school because the farm can be just as efficient and producing as it would be without the children.
Corporate farms are going to love this even though they'll hate the initial cost of the machines being greater than the poor Mexican wages.
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Newsflash: when robots and machines result in less expense to produce produce they will be used. That simple. Once upon a time they used Manuel for manual labor in the wheat and cotton fields. Then along came machines and the farmers had a choice of a couple of machines that never needed rest and eliminate all of his HR problems. Coal mining requires a mere fraction of the labor once needed and has seen production gains on an order of m
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What he's saying is that we had this tech for a long time, why is it suddenly starting to get used now? He says it's because of the crackdown on illegal immigrants. If the immigrant will work for $4 and hour, the native worker will ask for $7, and the robot's sales guy shows up and tells you it'll cost you an equivalent of a $6 an hour worker, who will you go with? The immigrant of course.
Now as soon as you get rid of the immigrants, the rob
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Remember, the cost of insurance is going through the roof. These machines will ALWAYS win out because you don't need to pay for health care, you don't need to pay for mandatory sexual harassment training, you never have to worry that f
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An illegal immigrant isn't going to get insurance, sue you, get a pension, etc. AFAIK, illegal immigrants here are paid with cash, which means no taxes to pay either.
That sort of thing is dangerous to try with a legal resident, as they can sue you, while an illegal immigrant probably would get deported before anything happened.
Standard pattern. (Score:2)
We've had individual bits of the technology since the (roughly) the mid 70's, but it takes years to integrate individual concepts into a functioning system.
On the other hand, automated warehouses aren't "suddenly" popping up, the first attempts began in the early/mid 80's, and they started to spread in the early 90's. It wasn't until the dot-com revolution (with it's increased emphasis on central
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Now that B2B communications are streamlined, you have to look for new
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Yes, I know those things are older than the dot com revolution - and, had you read my message, you'd have noted I stated the growth in these types of warehousing operations started before the dot com. But the dot com era saw a massive growth in demand in these types of operations. Partly for dot
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Oh, and regardless of immigration laws I think that over the long term globalisation will redistribute money from rich countries to poor countries so that cheap immigrant labour will no longer be an option.
Re:Bread and Circuses (Score:2)
I've debated this in my own head for a while because even though I have a job that maybe the mid-range of jobs that will get replaced by automation, it will eventually.
The key here is economic forces and the cost of living and entertainment costs. In America most of the jobs have gone
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When we have a developed state where the state takes care of every citizen's basic human needs like healthcare and education and eliminates the social unrest caused by unemployment by offering satisfying unemployment benefits then any small-scale "industrial revolution" event like this one, which end up completely eliminating jobs, will no
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Well, the technocratic idea is to give everyone "energy credits" which represent a certain percentage of energy production, the cost of various items and services would then be directly proportional to how much energy is required to supply them.
There are of course problems with greed which is why a society like this won't be likely until we are able to produce goods on such a level that your ability to consume manufactured goods won't be hindered by how well-paid you are but rather by the fact that you are
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___
Who wouldn't.
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Queuing by the soup-kitchens?
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Obviously the idea is that you automate the boring jobs and make sure that everyone shares the wealth. You OTOH are still thinking in terms of dollars, profits and shareholders (at least that's how your post reads). I'm not saying there are no problems with the idea but I am saying you have to look beyond what we have right now to understand the appeal of it.
There would probably still be a need for people to help customers in stores, but imagine if they didn't have to stock shelves, clean up in the isles a
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You mean starving/begging/stealing?
True, there are a lot of shitty jobs that people would happily do without but, let's face it, not everyone could possibly be employed as an expert -- even if they had the skills.
I think it's far more likley that people work just because they need the m
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Insightful, but we reached that point decades ago.
See:
"The
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So, we should strive to do only the bare minimum necessary for survival? No thanks. The fundamental problem with Bob Bla
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Because you want more than the minimum, and are willing to sacrifice your free time to do so, does that mean everyone else should be forced to work too?
From the related links I posted, human beings (hunters and gatherers) once spent most of thei
Re:Very promising. [MY ASS] (Score:1)
I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want.
We've got that allready and it is called unemployment. You can substitize a little but it won't work on a long term with the current world economy. So sorry to interrupt this candid vision with reality:
* Mobile Phones also meant work can reach you anywhere
* Email and lotus notes give your bosses the unheard power to assign you tasks to work on weekends
* Globalization makes white collars work around the clock (you start working with asi
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As others have noted, we're already there if you're just talking about food, clothing and shelter. But as our technology improves, our demand for convenience also increases; so I doubt we'll ever see a "Utopia" such as you describe. We will never "get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants" because our definition of "mundane" is always changing.
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You're missing the promise (Score:2)
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After age 21 it seems all that a large portion of the population wants to do is watch TV and get laid. Not everyone can be a Nielson viewer and the military/church seriously hates any contraception that might lower their recruitment pool.
Unskilled and semi-skilled day labor exits for a reason:
Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior.
-- Richard Dawkins
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So workers lose out big time while the firm
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Because let's be honest, wouldn't we love to live in a world where all almost all menial labour is performed by automated machines with only a handful of skilled experts controlling the machines? I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want. If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore
T
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Is this new? (Score:1)
Ofc tank parts aren't as sensitive to first in-first out as foodstuffs, but still, not all that sensational, is it?
Just because we can, that's why. (Score:2, Insightful)
Machines can't ask for benefits, sue for safer conditions, unionize or any of that nasty stuff.
Now all they need to do is actually buy all the wonderful outsourced or made in China items they're shipping.
Of course they'll also have to realize at some point that maybe replacing 5 guys that made 20k$ a year with a 2 million dollar system wasn't such a cunning plan, but by then, it'll be time to
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Luckily this was a sane company, so they di
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This system doesn't replace 5 guys making $20k a year. (A company with a shipping department that small would likely never be able to afford the $2 million in the first place.)
The warehouses are not the reason for waiting (Score:2)
1) the package delivery service does not have a pick-up point to where you can send your item - yes, currently living alone;
2) the item has to be ordered by the online shop.
This might speed up some things, but they don't remove the real problems. It might be interesting for other reasons than delivery time, or when near real time delivery is in order (e.g. Ikea like concept, without the hassle o
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I've seen something like this (Score:5, Interesting)
This was 4 years ago, so not sure how cutting edge the technology is...
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Robotic forklifts are nothing new. What's is new, at least to me, is the "swarming" idea here. The robots don't service pre-specified areas of the warehouse, or work for pre-specified human operators; several can work together to fulfill an order and are dynamically tasked to people depending on who needs what next. If a robot breaks down, apparently the others just work around it. These robots don't fetch individual items; instead
Maybe they can learn from AMD and Intel? (Score:1)
L1 cache (the box directly in front of the worker) should be used as best as possible. Prefill orders not received yet with this (box of chocholates always present on Valentine's day)
L2 cache is the isle closet the the workers, have a dedicated (fast) robot always waiting here.
L3 (or memory) is the wareh
Defrag? (Score:1)
Defrag? Manual Override by the Hoomanz! (Score:3, Informative)
I worked on the docs for something similar - a robot fetch to conveyer packing - and there are periodic "defrags" where humans with barcode scanners check each bin and inventory the contents, then adjust inventory to match what is REALLY in the bins. Robots are powered down for this :)
The packers could also send a bin off to the Orwellian-sounding "readj
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BHV's "Zebulons" by Bruno Lussato in the 70' (Score:1)
However the experience came perhaps too soon : the minicomputers on board did not have the reliability that one can expect today from any mainboard with its associated processor, and gene
Hey, robots come help me home too, please. (Score:1)
Who will terminate the manual laborers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because I feel I'm near the top of the cognitive scale*, robots don't bother me. They mean that I get things faster, more accurately, and probably cheaper. But there are a lot of people who are going to be idled by this type of technology. And the world population is still growing, so there will be even more at the lower end of the scale (in numbers - it's simple statistics), and fewer jobs for them. It's a bit odd, but there has recently been a big backlash over the eugenics movement that occurred in the mid 20th century in the US, mostly because it's politically incorrect to talk of such things. We are getting so efficient that we can more easily support those at the bottom. The question is...do we want to?
*Please don't give me shit about that comment - practically everyone on
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Having read all of this some time ago I came to the conclusion that this scenario requires some of the more fucking stupid self destructive elements of American culture to remain un
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That's a great argument for eugenics, sure. Sounds like good Nazi-speak, really.
It's not that people are stupid, it's just that they're written off. I remember when we were shedding jobs right and left in the '90s, and there was all kinds of noise coming out of the Clinton administration about retraining people and about "knowledge-based" jobs or something like that. So yeah, industry felt more free, I think, to fire people and run ove
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Stupid. Written off. Underprivileged. Poorly motivated. Call them whatever you like. There is a large segment of the population who - fo
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No, there really are stupid people in the world. I don't really know why I would have to point that out. And as the OP pointed out, jobs are getting more complex while automation is driving out the bottom whatever % of people who simply don't have the skills to compete in a modern economy. Those are facts.
So instead of Godwinning the thread like a douchebag because what he said might be non-PC, why not add to the conversation? Thi
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We raise people to be meat robots, and it's only a small percentage that refuse. We keep treating them as meat robots in their jobs. When they stop having to be a meat robot all the time... some will sink into indolence, but how
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One of the major issues with Western Culture is our overemphasis on productivity, efficiency, and industry.
There are no food shortages today, only problems with distribution. Why? Because it is not profitable to get the food to the people who need it.
Energy? Medicine? Space? For which of these problems is a horde of unskilled laborers a solution?
Which of these problems is a horde of unskilled humans exacerbating, and in what ways?
If we can offset the burden placed on society by n
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No, actually it isn't 'simple statistics'... Because while world population is growing (overall), the rate of increase in developed countries has dropped dramatically - in some places in Europe it has already dropped below replacement rate, and in others the curves point plainly to a peak in midcentury and a drop thereafter.
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Seems pretty pointless to me (Score:1)
OLD Technology (Score:1)
15 Years? Try at least 38 years. (Score:2)
You are right on the money is saying it is OLD technology.
Corpus Christi Army Depot has had this for years (Score:2)
It's a big system called ASRS+ which combines a large highly-automated warehouse with a multitude of high-load bearing floor robots that drive around and transfer parts between the warehouse and the requesting party in the depot. CCAD is mostly a helicopter repair/refurb facility and because they service such a wide variety of aircraft, require an extensive inventory. These robots look vaguely like a pallet-jack on roids, without all the sci-fi robotic amenities. These bots drive about on their cute li
Is Boston becoming the Robotics Hub? (Score:1, Interesting)
From the www.sheeleytech.com article:
This isn't going to replace that much. (Score:1)
nothing new (Score:2)
Another piece of the puzzle (Score:3, Informative)
Slowly these things get better. Automatically guided vehicles have been around for about 25 years, and they keep improving. Early ones were guided by wires buried in the floor, and essentially ran on tracks. Now they have much more flexibility.
About fifteen years ago there was a research project which used small forklift-like robots. These worked together to move loads too big for one to lift. Two such robots could pick up and move a couch. That idea needs to be revived.
Quietly, the machinery for moving containers around ports is becoming automated. Several ports now have large, autonomous machines moving containers around. [ieee.org] Antwerp has had this for years, but there the container sits on top of the AGV. The new approach is automated straddle cranes, the same cranes normally driven by humans. The article points out that the robots drive better than people; fuel and tire consumption are down 30%. The big container cranes themselves have had vision systems and LIDAR units for years; many are now fully automated.
Not so new tech. (Score:2)
Even their returns system is automated. (Dubbed "Reverse Logistics")
This is how postal workers end up going nuts... (Score:2, Interesting)
The initial cool factor of being payed well to load and babysit the robots never quite wears off, although you do acclimate to the situation. After a while and you could actually feel the pulse of the factory as e
Who's left? (Score:2)
Whatever you think of the manual laborer, he is the one whose purchasing power sustains many companies.
To put it another way, predators need prey. No prey, no predators.
Karel the Robot (Score:1)
Reminds me of the Book Karel the Robot. It was a book that introduced programming as a little robot that was part of a room and could be instructed to do different things.
http://karel.sourceforge.net/
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No one would know where the items are located currently and backups containing those locations might be hours old. This system really needs some serious redundancy.
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Re:distribution bots (Score:2)