Fetch Robotics Unveils Warehouse Robots 49
gthuang88 writes: Warehouse automation has become a big business, with Amazon's Kiva robots leading the way. Now a startup called Fetch Robotics is rolling out a pair of new robots that can pick boxes off of shelves, pass them to each other, and carry the goods to a shipping station. Fetch, led by Willow Garage veteran Melonee Wise, is competing with companies like Amazon's Kiva Systems, Rethink Robotics, and Harvest Automation to develop dexterous, mobile robots for retail, distribution, and manufacturing.
fetch (Score:1)
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Next revolution in robotics.
"Fetich Robotics Unveils Whorehouse Robots"
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The horror of all those dollar a blow working girls no longer having a job.
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Warehouses are slow to adapt. And run on low margins 20-30 years is more reasonable. Because warehouse rarely move and will require massive overhaul. Hell barcoding is only deployed to 40-50% of warehouses. That alone should tell you how low margin warehouses operate. Barcoding with software and hardware is $10k, another 10k to deploy it, yet most warehouses can't afford that.
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Running on low margins doesn't help much if the competition is undercutting you with lower costs. At least in the bragging video komplett.no made with AutoStore, they claimed going from a picker performance of 100 pieces/day to 100 pieces/hour = 8x performance as the system lines up the boxes at the picking station. Pick, scan, pick, scan, pick, scan, put in box for shipping, scan shipping box, done as opposed to running around the warehouse, particularly for new employees who have a hard time finding thing
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>And if the cost for these robots go down enough in the next 5 to 10 years, he could be out of a job
For the typical warehouse operation, either the cost of converting from human labor to bots will have to drop to a third of the current prices, or the cost of labor will have to rise about 30%, before it becomes cost-effective to retrofit the operation to mainly/exclusively bots.
Any rational company, building a warehouse today, is going to design it for bots doing all of the grunt work. The only on-site hu
This is news - how? (Score:4)
At LEAST fifteen years ago, more like twenty years ago, I delivered freight to a Mary Kay plant that had this. Perhaps those robots were less advanced than Amazon's robots - but then, Mary Kay has had plenty of time to improve on their robots.
I'll be honest - I didn't have any opportunity to just stand around and watch those robots, or time to interrogate the people working at the plant. And, no way in hell would anyone let me play with those robots. All that I can tell you for sure, is that robots were wandering the plant floor, carrying articles from hither to thither. Some would disappear in between the aisles of warehouse shelves, carrying a box of something, and reappear empty. Others would go between the shelves empty, and come back with something. Most would then aim themselves through the doors, into the plant proper, presumably to deliver those items to a work station, or to get items from a work station.
Oh - yeah - it's wonderful. We're moving closer to that imagined post-prosperity world, huh? I'm not believing that the ruling class is going to share any of that prosperity with the masses, but, yeah, we're moving closer to it.
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Perhaps those robots were less advanced than Amazon's robots
But were they pink? [cartoonistgroup.com]
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I'm color blind, or color impaired. Quite naturally, I don't really see pink most of the time. Hot pink, in bright sunlight, yeah, but there are shades that I just don't see. I'm not sure if the robots were pink or not - they were a light color, could have been beige, white, or some light shade of pink.
Mary Kay does run pink Freightliners and trailers up and down the road though. Some of them are dark enough that I can actually see the pink, others are lighter, and they just look white to me. Most of t
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Hey, this is off-topic, but I've been interested in the topic of color blindness recently, after figuring out that my son is color blind. He has not been officially diagnosed as colorblind (and he is only 4), but he has a lot of trouble with certain shades or blends, and the Ishihara plate graphics that we tried online seemed pretty definitive as well.
I'm just curious about your experience. My son seems to have NO trouble with red and green most of the time (which I didn't expect), but rather colors like pu
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Color vision at four years old. I couldn't tell the green from the brown Crayola. And, the purple or violet crayola looked blue to me.
Red flowers in a field of green are pretty much invisible, as you state. Many times as a youth, my mother would exclaim over some pretty red flowers as we drove by. I would look, see nothing, and just look at her.
I should have realized that I was color blind around age twelve. Got interested in electronics, found some schematics, and tore into old electrical gadgets that
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> I'm not sure if the robots were pink or not - they were a light color, could have been beige, white, or some light shade of pink.
In a fit of moronic stupidity, Mary Kay let its trademarked color lapse. Since then, the company has been scrambling to find a shade of pink that they can claim to be theirs, and theirs alone. Consequently, their livery has ranged from a pearly white-pink, to a very dark purple-pink, wandering through both orange-pink, and a greenish-pink.
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Ahhhh - that MIGHT explain some of my confusion. I had just ASSumed that any problems associated with colors were my own problems.
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But were they pink?
pink robots [arrestedmotion.com]
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I'm afraid, son or daughter, that this is why some of us oldsters started learning the software that runs various robots about 25 years ago. I'm also afraid that your bet on that "geezer" card is making me raise the pot by about 10 years and call. Unless someone else wants to bid in this game?
The key when confronted by awareness of changing technology and workplace requirements is not to bemoan who will have the power. It's to join, or at least make sure you have the skills to work for, the powerful.
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We're not gonna need seven billion repairmen. We're not gonna need seven /million/ repairmen.
The truth is that we're not gonna need seven repairmen. Self-driving cars will deliver robot repairmen and new parts to factories too small to have their own in-house, if such a thing even exists. Remember, the trend in everything is more and more modularity. We're only going to need people to do program and design, and more and more aspects of those jobs are being automated. Sooner or later, people will design new components (with mostly-automated tools) and then robots will use genetic (and other) algorit
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Maybe you can answer your own question, if you'll answer a couple other questions first.
Who, exactly, would decide to dispatch 10,000 robots to Nepal?
Who, exactly, has the resources to actually send them?
Who, exactly, has the AUTHORITY to make that decision, and to appropriate resources to that mission?
And, finally, how, exactly, would that mission benefit those people who own that authority and those resources?
There are a number of conspiracy theories floating around, regarding the depopulation of the eart
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Well - I think that I made it fairly clear that I had seen robots doing roughly the same job that these robots are designed to do. I think that my post was less binary than you imply. There are groups doing pretty amazing things with robots today. When they untethered that dog/wolf robot, that was actually newsworthy. When it first learned to walk over rubble, that was then newsworthy. Prior to that, when it first learned to walk, that was then newsworthy.
The reason that I didn't consider this story to
Capital always competes with labour (Score:4, Informative)
I think I got modded down at least 2000 times in the last 16 years or so for saying this particular simple thing: capital competes with labour.
Labour and capital are in competition, there is always some price point, where it is cheaper to invest capital to reduce reliance on labour and the opposite is also true, should labour become cheap enough it can win against capital for some time at least.
What are the factors that lead towards labour being more expensive than capital? Well, in the so called 'developed' nations that would be government created inflation (paper fiat printing and interest rate manipulation), business regulations (which are taxes) and other income and wealth taxes.
The price of labour in the free market may or may not in some cases lead to investment of capital in order to displace the said labour but in a non-free market system that the so called 'developed' world is running the price of labour is artificially high, pushed by regulations and laws and taxes high enough for capital to win over and over and over and over.
Companies like Uber and many others will come up with ways to bring down the cost of labour by getting around regulations and laws (and hopefully taxes at some point) in order to make labour competitive again. For now we are not there yet.
Various economic indicators in the USA are showing a significant slow down in the economy, it's systemic but the TV will make you think this is all weather related, which is pure nonsense. Weather happens, so do other things, these things shouldn't cause the so called 'economists' miss their targets all the time by such huge margins. The USA (and some other) economy is dying the death of trillions of cuts administered by the government and various 'progressive' agenda but also by the mix of corporate/state agenda that prevents free market from working. Free market is then blamed, the idiots say: 'free market fails' or whatnot, when the reality is that it is their system of government that fails to protect individual liberties and freedoms required for the free market to exist.
There will be no easy fix for this failure to protect individual liberties, it will be a painful and very expensive crash, the question is what do you do after that crash?
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or just riot and let the jail take care of feeding you and giving you a doctor
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There won't be any jail or doctors after rioting because of this.
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After the crash? You make sure you have lots of guns and your food is locked down. Then lock n load because all starving impoverished libtard SJWs will be desperate and ready to kill anyone to stay alive. Well their fantasy will have dissolved right before them and it will be society's duty to "clean up the parasites"
Apropos of nothing, I note that we are in a deflationary cycle [usinflatio...ulator.com] right now, for the first quarter of 2015.
Surprisingly, this little tidbit made hardly a ripple in the mainstream news outlets.
So... is this the recession that causes the crash, or will that be after the next recession?
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Those inflation numbers are hogwash, do not buy into the agenda that government is pushing, the interest rates are at 0% and have been at 0 for 6 years. Never before has this actually happened, never before has anybody tied their economy to 0% interest rates for such a long time. It is not going to be possible to get off the 0% interest rates without an economic collapse (which is inevitable and actually required to fix the issues that have accumulated in the economy since the creation of the Federal rese
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Ok, but look past the initial reaction, what are the next 20 years going to be like past the first shock of a crash? Let's say the dollar and the bond markets collapse, the stock and other asset markets go through the roof as people are fleeing the dollar, but housing market collapses anyway, because almost all of it is borrowed money and almost nobody has real savings to buy a house outright. So money generating ventures gain relative value while money pits (houses) lose value once fiat dies and is displ
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If it comes down to that I need only one gun and one bullet to solve all my problems. I'm checking out.
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What are the factors that lead towards labour being more expensive than capital? Well, in the so called 'developed' nations that would be government created inflation (paper fiat printing and interest rate manipulation), business regulations (which are taxes) and other income and wealth taxes.
Inflation tends to nail both labor and capital. Resources and materials hold their value, but wages don't track inflation. And capital gains tax is a problem for capital.
Regulations aren't taxes because for the most part the state isn't getting revenue from the regulation. There are ways to turn such things into an effective tax such as US police departments generating funding via civil forfeiture laws, but it's not the default state of regulation.
Various economic indicators in the USA are showing a significant slow down in the economy, it's systemic but the TV will make you think this is all weather related, which is pure nonsense. Weather happens, so do other things, these things shouldn't cause the so called 'economists' miss their targets all the time by such huge margins. The USA (and some other) economy is dying the death of trillions of cuts administered by the government and various 'progressive' agenda but also by the mix of corporate/state agenda that prevents free market from working. Free market is then blamed, the idiots say: 'free market fails' or whatnot, when the reality is that it is their system of government that fails to protect individual liberties and freedoms required for the free market to exist.
I agree.
Huh (Score:1)
led by Willow Garage veteran Melonee Wise, is competing with companies like Amazon's Kiva Systems, Rethink Robotics, and Harvest Automation to develop dexterous, mobile robots for retail, distribution, and manufacturing.
OK lets adjust that..
led by Willow Garage veteran Melonee Wise, is competing with companies like Amazon's Kiva Systems, Rethink Robotics, and Harvest Automation to further gut the employment market and jobs/opportunities by replacing humans with robots.
FIFY
Rant Rant a Rerant (Score:2)
Stop trying to make fetch happen (Score:2)
It's not going to happen.
AMAZING!!!! (Score:2)
Companies like Dematic have been doing that for decades. Welcome to the 1990's FETCH!
Wonderful (Score:1)