Robot-Run Warehouse Speeds Deliveries

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."

Very promising.

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)

Re:Very promising.

I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want.

Technology hasn't increased leisure time. Rather it has only lengthened working hours except where the law has gotten involved (thank goodness for 35-hour working weeks in the EU as opposed to Victorian-era coal mines). Modern technological societies work much longer hours than hunter and gatherer cultures, though of course sitting in a cubicle is much less exhausting than chasing after a boar.

There is the old adage that work expands to fill the hours set for it. Now that the Western world is used to working all day every day, even after the rise of robot labour we might not necessarily get the utopia some people envision.

John Zerzan is probably the most well-known writer on the theme that technology only shackles humanity, see e.g. his Against Civilization [amazon.com] . I don't agree with quite a lot of what he writes, but it is nonetheless thought-provoking.

Re:Very promising.

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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> Technology hasn't increased leisure time. Rather it has only lengthened working hours except where the law has gotten involved (thank goodness for 35-hour working weeks

> in the EU as opposed to Victorian-era coal mines). Modern technological soci

Re:Very promising.

No, read up on hunter gatherer lifestyles. The work week in the Congo before European colonization was three days long. Agriculture was what brought in working from dusk to dawn every day.

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The real dream here is that 20% of the people would ever decide to support the other 80% out of the goodness of their hearts. These kinds of developments tend to be seen more as a harbinger of doom than pointing towards a future utopia. Eliminate all men

This Is Because of Immigration Laws

Eliminate all menial labor without drastically increasing the quality of education would result in massive unemployment and unrest, I fear. Yes, people would still be having trouble with their DSL, but as a result of the riots.

You know, I couldn't disagree with you more. You know why this technology is "suddenly" popping up even though we've really had it for a long time? How about the recent crack down on 'illegal aliens' in the states? This is going to spread everywhere because the cheap labor that was once here will slowly dry up. The people who traveled to farms to work in the summer, they can't do that anymore. You should expect to see these robots of various sizes and kinds show up on farms too to off set our loss of cheap labor.

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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Of course then there is always the problem of there is always a limited quantity of physical resources, ie energy, metals, plastics etc. How do you ration out this supply, do you just give people some form of ration credit or do you expect them to work in

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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

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"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

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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...

As others have noted, we're already there if you're just talking about food, clothing and shelter. But as our tech

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I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want.

For most of them, what they want to do would be sitting on their fat shellsuit-clad arses while getting even fatter, punctuated with

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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 wit

Just because we can, that's why.

Now it's the "service" jobs? Something really wonderful when the marginal pay jobs are being replaced with robotics.

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 t

The warehouses are not the reason for waiting

Most of the time, if I have to wait for something to be delivered, it is not the warehouses that I am waiting for:
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

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Yes, but making warehouses more efficient will encourage companies to outsource their logistics operations to outfits with this kind of capability. Economies of scale will then make it possible to fill your order from stock more often. As for delivery, t

I've seen something like this

I used to work for a major pharma company that had a big plant in Ireland. They had a massive totally automated warehouse, with one spider in it that could pick up any pallet and deliver it to almost anywhere in the plant in minutes. Inside the warehouse was strictly off limits, no space at all for human traffic. It had a few teething problems, but it did what 20ish people used to do in a fraction of the time.

This was 4 years ago, so not sure how cutting edge the technology is...

Who will terminate the manual laborers?

This is what's lost on these discussions. We're eliminating jobs for those in the manual labor sector. What? Train them for something else? I suggest looking at my sig. There are a lot of people out there who are simply untrainable. The gap between the top 20% of the population and the bottom 20% of the population in the ability to excel at modern, efficient methods an techniques is just astounding. In an agrarian world, being dumb may hold you back a bit, but you can still make a living and be productive. We're eliminating that class. The result is that, with a compressed intellectual range of "valuable" occupations, the disparity in cognitive ability has widened relative to the scale by which we measure. That was terribly worded...um...if the job market in the early 20th century had lots of positions for people who's cognitive skill set ranged from a "3" to a "10" on a scale of 1-10, the job market today has the majority in the range of "5" to "10", and we're moving towards the "7" to "10" range. The further we go, the more people will not be competent to do the jobs available. Now that's okay, because with efficiencies and replacement of lower skilled jobs by machines means we need fewer people at that level. At the same time that's a problem because you just can't go and kill all those folks who are no longer needed. Ideally we could get rid of those in society as we replaced them with machines. Otherwise they become unemployable wards of the state, or turn to illegal means to support themselves.

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 /. is near the top.

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IMHO a lot of them are "stupid" because they've been trained to be stupid by the schools and culture - when kids are taught to sit down, shut up, do endless repetitive work, and not ask any questions, they stop learning. Kids are learning machines, but the

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I'm not saying I'm for it, I'm making an observation and saying that there's discontinuity between the workplace which will exist and the workforce which is available. Personally, I think humans would be better off with between 1% and 10% of their numbers.

Another piece of the puzzle

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.

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I know they had them in Japan as far back as 1994, in freezer warehouses where the temperature was always -40F.

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Omeone tried to sell me this system for my warehouse just last week. I laughed politely. $2 000 000 + to replace one guy + another 5 or 6 temps, two months per year? I don't think so...

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You are missing the point. When humans have to find items moving them around frequently will slow things down. But robots have no trouble keeping track of any number of items and their location. So the "locating an item" time becomes constant and small.

Defrag? Manual Override by the Hoomanz!

"I wonder how long it takes to defrag the entire warehouse. Heaven help them if it's a bubble sort. B-Tree perhaps? Oh -- and what about lost clusters?"

I worked on the docs for something similar - a robot fetch to conveyer packing - and there are periodi