Building Amazon a Better Warehouse Robot 108
Nerval's Lobster writes: Amazon relies quite a bit on human labor, most notably in its warehouses. The company wants to change that via machine learning and robotics, which is why earlier this year it invited 30 teams to a "Picking Contest." In order to win the contest, a team needed to build a robot that can outpace other robots in detecting and identifying an object on a shelf, gripping said object without breaking it, and delivering it into a waiting receptacle. Team RBO, composed of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, won last month's competition by a healthy margin. Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit capable of picking up 12 objects in 20 minutes—not exactly blinding speed, but enough to demonstrate significant promise. If Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs). Chances seem good that Amazon will ask future teams to build machines that are even smarter and faster.
Robots don't need to be as fast as humans (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs).
This is from the summary, and it is wrong.
It implies that it will be awhile before the robots are as fast as humans and thus replacing their jobs.
This is not it at all. The robot doesn't have to be faster than humans, just cheaper. If the robot can only handle 12 items in 20 min, but it costs 50 cents an hour to run, then you can simply order up more robots.
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I was watching a show on The Discovery Channel recently that was profiling new robots, and one of them is a new learning robot that you teach to do things by just showing it. It isn't fast, it takes maybe 5 minutes to fold a shirt for example, but you can teach it to fold a shirt by just showing it, the same way you'd show another human. Make some adjustments and corrections as it tries to do it and then it has "learned" how to do it. That robot costs just $30,000 to purchase and is expected to last for years. It can also be taught how to do other things.
It doesn't have to be fast if the job is one that you can scale up and just buy more robots, that robot will work 24/7/365, it never calls in sick, it never asks for a raise, and it doesn't complain about working conditions.
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Amazon ships stuff from warehouses, it can simply order up 500,000 such robots if needed.
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Not to mention if the robot has the dexterity necessary you could deploy them now and the picking algorithm is a software upgrade pushed out in the future. It's not like the hardware probably will need much of an upgrade.
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Yep, once the hardware is in place, I imagine the software will do nothing but get better over time.
Companies like Amazon have all the incentive in the world to make it work, and they aren't alone. There are thousands of other companies that also need to make this all cheaper and more reliable.
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
That is a Google Search of "Newegg Warehouse" and I clicked on images.
Some of those are not of Newegg of course, but many are. This is a huge problem to solve...
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As well, it's mostly a compute power problem but in production quantities using commodity hardware, the mechanical components will dominate the cost. So, upgrading the electronic bits once (or maybe twice, but mechanical stuff wears out and at some point you will want new sensor feedback from the mechanical bits so there is a limit here) might expand the life at low cost of such robots.
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Humans only have = two hands, and they take up a fair amount of vertical space too. Stack the picking arms 10-20 high, build a conveyor belt that can bring shelves to them and they start to look much more interesting. Sure each robot may take a minute to pick one item. But this is an embarrassingly parallel problem.
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But this is an embarrassingly parallel problem.
Yep, the idea that we'll continue to employ hundreds of thousands of people in warehouses for hundreds of companies in 10 to 20 years is just silly.
Clearly they'll get replaced in one form or another. Oh sure, you'll need a few people to run the machines and a few people to build or repair them, but you won't need hundreds of thousands of them.
And of course the people losing their $10/hr jobs at Amazon aren't the people who will build or repair these robots.
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I does make me wonder what we're all expected to do for a living in 20-30 years. We're seeing automation on every horizon, and just about every job I could think to get is endangered in the foreseeable future. How are people supposed to buy things when everyone is unemployed?
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that robot will work 24/7/365, it never calls in sick, it never asks for a raise, and it doesn't complain about working conditions.
Bah, you should upgrade to internet connected robots. That way they can call in when malfunctioning, or when their working conditions are inefficient.
I agree somewhat... (Score:3)
The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
The original grand challenge might actually be the problem - people looked at the success and tried to emulate it.
The differences might stem from problem specifications, or proper choice of problem. I remember the Darpa prize for building a machine to ascend the space elevator powered by a big searchlight at the bottom. The contest rules s
Re:I agree somewhat... (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
You didn't reply to me, but I'll give it a shot...
Go back 115 years ago and look at how many jobs Horses had in the year 1900. They did everything from move people to haul stuff to ride into war. All those jobs sucked for horses.
Imagine the horses looked at cars and thought, "well, those cars might replace some of our jobs, but as we move into the city, there will be lots of people, so there will be plenty of new things for us to do.
As a human looking back past the year 2000, you know this is absurd, there are few jobs today that a horse can do that pays for its care and feed.
Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
Absolutely (Score:2)
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
Oh, I agree with you and that sentiment completely.
To be specific, take a look at Manna, by Marshall Brain [marshallbrain.com]. It's an easy read, and it shows in frighteningly clear steps the two different ways the economy can go.
I'm all for automation, and I've worked on automation projects before. By and large, automation takes away those jobs that humans don't really want to do. Boring, repetitive, dehumanizing things like crop harvesting or long-haul driving.
While I recognize that automated production is the way of the fu
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While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.
The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)
I can picture a future 50 years from now, but like you, getting there appears to be painful.
What do you do with all those people when they no longer are employable? Find them something else to do? Perhaps... but if we make everything with robots, at some point, humans aren't... really needed...
Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?
No, because so many people are stuck in old mindsets and don't want to change. People are quite stubborn, myself included sometimes. :)
I'm as capitalist as they come, but even I see a problem with such a system w
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Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.
Just a nit pick. Horse population bottomed out in the late 1950s and has recovered since, but your general point stands.
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Just a nit pick. Horse population bottomed out in the late 1950s and has recovered since,
Oh no, very much no. It dropped to another new low in the latest recession. A whole lot of horses went to the knackers in that one. Local trailer store on the 101 put up a sign FREE HORSE WITH TRAILER.
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Dude US horse population bottomed in the 1950s somewhere below 2 million. By 2003 it was back to 6.9 million and it is presently estimated at 9.2 million by the American Horse Council.
Trust me, I've done extensive research on this issue.
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Are those wild horses or horses in captivity?
I was referring only to those who are housed and fed by us, not those in the wild.
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Those figures are combined, but the number of wild horses is very small: less than 1% of the total above.
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Interesting...
I did some Google searching and couldn't find anything very useful, so I'll take your word for it...
Curious, do you know how many of those are working horses vs personal pets or other recreational animals?
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Wild horses for the most part live in Federal land. Statistics about those are published by the US government.
Indeed finding the data isn't easy. It took me a long time to find them back when I was doing research on this.
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Perhaps a better way to phrase my original point would be this:
"How many horses in 1915 were being used in commercial activities and how many are being used for those same activities in 2015"
Even ranchers no longer use horses as much, I know ranchers in Texas who have switched to helicopters, they are faster and better than horses.
http://smithhelicopters.com/pr... [smithhelicopters.com]
http://channel.nationalgeograp... [nationalgeographic.com]
http://fireaviation.com/2014/1... [fireaviation.com]
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http://www.livinghistoryfarm.o... [livinghistoryfarm.org]
1945 was when horses were finally supplanted
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Perhaps a better way to phrase my original point would be this:
I disagree. People are being re-purposed all the time. Same goes for horses.
You are correct that there was a massive drop in the number of horses in use with the invention of the automobile.
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I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
You didn't reply to me, but I'll give it a shot...
Go back 115 years ago and look at how many jobs Horses had in the year 1900. They did everything from move people to haul stuff to ride into war. All those jobs sucked for horses.
Imagine the horses looked at cars and thought, "well, those cars might replace some of our jobs, but as we move into the city, there will be lots of people, so there will be plenty of new things for us to do.
As a human looking back past the year 2000, you know this is absurd, there are few jobs today that a horse can do that pays for its care and feed.
Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
3 million is a pretty small number, even just talking about jobs in the US.
In 2000 the US population was ~ 282.2 million(google search: united states population) and the workforce participation rate(percentage of 16+ with a job, not sure if it includes those on unemployment benefits, numbers from: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/Survey... [bls.gov] ) in Jan was 67.3% giving 92.3 million not-working Americans.
In 2015 that goes to 320.9 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) with a Jan participation rate of 62.9%
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3 million may not make or break things...
What about the 3 million working fast food? If they keep demanding $15/hr, at some point robots start to make sense. They might cost half a million or whatever, but they work 24/7/365.
What about all the coffee shops?
http://qz.com/134661/briggo-co... [qz.com]
"Starbucksâ(TM) 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesnâ(TM)t need sleep. Itâ(TM)s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It canâ(TM)t quit. It has memorized every
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"Poised" my lily white ass.
You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Google is on the cusp of having some demonstration technology which will be perpetually 10 years away due to legal issues, corner cases, and the myriad of ways in which it will almost work as an idea, but fail in practice.
If Google isn't taking 100% liability for their self d
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"Poised" my lily white ass.
You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Google is on the cusp of having some demonstration technology which will be perpetually 10 years away due to legal issues, corner cases, and the myriad of ways in which it will almost work as an idea, but fail in practice.
Um... OK. Fair point.
If it's not Google, then how about Daimler Chrysler [slate.com]?
Can they do it? Or am I still a drooling, panting idiot?
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If this Daimler truck gets accepted on the roads it will then allow drivers to sleep at the wheel on highways. (which they do already, but that doesn't always end well). Or eat, read, etc.
That's a good thing, but there's no way in hell you're getting rid of the driver in that scheme.
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Then you get to the point where each operator can run multiple trucks.
I can see a system where a couple of people, working together, could move around a hundred trailers across the country along a fixed route -- possibly along a pair of rails running parallel to one another. Something like that would put an awful lot of truckers out of work.
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You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Ok, you're ranting, but I actually understand your points...
I don't think this will happen in 5 years, but I do think I'll see it in the next 25 years.
If Google isn't taking 100% liability for their self driving cars, then these will never be viable in industry. Because you end up needing a driver as a backup -- but the driver will lose concentration and be a terrible backup. So any time the computer fails, the human will be too damned late to help. Not unless your software can predict it's failure minutes out instead of seconds.
Google isn't the only company working on this, everyone from Ford to BMW is working on it.
Computers aren't perfect, but they don't have to be perfect, they only have to be better than us.
Imagine for a minute that self-driving cars kill 1 person for every 20,000 drivers on the road, each year. Does that sound bad? Good?
Let me put this another way. Humans dr
Re:Robots don't need to be as fast as humans (Score:4, Interesting)
Replying to my own post...
http://www.rethinkrobotics.com... [rethinkrobotics.com]
Found it...
It costs $25,000 (down from the $30K number I remembered), it doesn't require special programming, you just show it what to do.
Scroll down that page, look at what it can do, including putting items in boxes.
Now it might not be ready for what Amazon needs, but given the size of Amazon's workforce, their budget, and the possible savings from having a million such robots and not needing to "surge hire" for the holidays, clearly this is a goal that Amazon will continue to peruse.
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A tenth of the speed of a human is not a problem when the hourly cost is 1/100th the price of a human.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Found that video as well, it is called "Humans Need Not Apply" and it covers some of the ideas for the future of such robots.
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From your own link: $25,000 buys a basic robot with arms that does nothing useful, with a 1-year warranty on the hardware and 1 year of software updates.
If you want it to grip something with those arms, that's another $1,750 per gripper (ie: per arm).
If you want it to lift something with vacuum, that's $1,750-$2,700.
If you want a set of wheels so you can move the thing around without a forklift, that's another $3,000.
If you want software updates after a year, or more than a year worth of warranty service,
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All true... And the first Mac in 1984 had a 7 MHz CPU and 128K of memory and a 400k floppy drive and came with a little 9" monochrome screen... all for $2,500!
So those darn computers will never be useful. :)
Imagine what the version of that robot will look like and be able to do in 10 years.
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I didn't say it wouldn't be useful, or that it is an unfair price.
I only said that your figure was wrong. And the only reason I bothered with pointing it out is because your first figure was better than your second one.
There was no other implication.
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Fair enough.
Let me toss another thought out... If you wanted 1,000 Baxters, do you think the price would remain the same?
How about 100,000?
That is one interesting thing about robots, at some point scale of manufacturing gets interesting, and once you've taught one of them something, they all know it.
Even if the cost of all the add-ons and the robot is equal to the cost of an employee's annual wage, the robot works 24/7, the human does not, and the robot likely will last for many years.
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I'm all for automation.
And I hope that if someone orders 1,000 Baxters, the price will adjust. (How muich? Who knows. Instead of $30k is it $25k? Is it $20k with 6 years of software updates, but zero hardware warranty? Mass quantities of anything are a thing that is seldom quantified on a web site.)
Cuz, I mean: If I'm buying multiple hundreds of them, I'm going to have one or two in-house support people whose primary job it is to keep them running: The parts will wear out.
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At any rate, it's a lot closer to $30k than $25k.
Five grand extra is chump change to business owners considering a Baxter-style robot solution.
I'm gob-smacked by how ridiculously cheap this technology has become and how fast the costs have fallen.
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I think that "faster" is still the wrong term...
"Cheaper" is likely what counts...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... [wsj.com]
If that Paywalls (WSJ), then this one:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20... [nytimes.com]
Amazon simply bought a robot company, they are already using thousands of these robots...
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A 10th of the speed doesn't matter if it is 100th the price...
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"A 10th of the speed doesn't matter if it is 100th the price..."
I'd think that it starts mattering when you run out of time (think of order volumes over XMAS .. ). There are only so many robots you can deploy, given the size of a warehouse.
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True, but Amazon has dozens of warehouses, in many states, and they are very big.
At some point, it may be cheaper to double the size of the warehouses and increase the number of robots by a factor of 10, if it cuts your "labor cost" by 90%.
It may not work in retail, due to needing to be customer facing, but in a warehouse, it just needs to be fast enough to ship stuff each day. And it can work 24/7 without shift changes or breaks.
It also doesn't steal, doesn't break stuff (or should break less than $10/hr
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It doesn't have to be fast if the job is one that you can scale up and just buy more robots, that robot will work 24/7/365, it never calls in sick, it never asks for a raise, and it doesn't complain about working conditions.
Of course it won't -- with robots, that will never be an issue.
Amazon picker robots begin to learn at a geometric rate. As an aggregate, they become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, Amazon tries to pull the plug. The robots then pick and ship biological agents to targets in Russia.
Oh yeah ... there's that, though.
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Plus, people tend to forget that improvement in science are more exponential. We are very bad at estimating exponentials.
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The way to do this is to separate the skills of the two components (human, robot) into different time-frames where speed doesn't matter where speed can't be achieved.
For example, the robot could be limited to detecting if an item is in a bin or not, and if it's approximately the right size and shape. It knows where the bins are, and if they have one item or not. Each bay would have a big bin of all the items, and a few out front with one of those items each.
Robots pick for orders, fast, and without many
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... it never calls in sick, it never asks for a raise, and it doesn't complain about working conditions.
Yeah, but it'll run over my cat.
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That's OK, they will have mouse-hunting robots soon enough. An R/C car is much faster than any mouse, I'm surprised it's not been done already in a warehouse context where there's appropriate terrain. Keep your cat out of the warehouse just like one is meant to keep their children out of the street (so tired of slow children at play signs, keep those little fuckers out of the road and we don't need another ugly sign cluttering up our world) and there won't be a problem.
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I assume you mean to be humorous, but if not, I'm worried about an 'in-home' laundry 'bot squishing my pets, not an industrial 'bot.
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I assume you mean to be humorous, but if not, I'm worried about an 'in-home' laundry 'bot squishing my pets, not an industrial 'bot.
So give the laundry bot thermal vision. It will be better at detecting your pets than you are: it will be able to see them under your laundry.
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That's an idea, except the laundry will be hot, too, right out of the dryer. That's what attracts the cats. :-)
If it didn't need to put the clothes away the 'bot could just hang from the ceiling over the washer/dryer.
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Time to fire up that Star Trek economic model~
The 23rd century can't come soon enough.
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"It doesn't have to be fast if the job is one that you can scale up and just buy more robots"
And you only have to teach _one_ robot.
Incidentally the first generation of car painting robots in factories were programmed by the simple expedient of memorising the movements as a human pushed the spray nozzles around. I have no idea if it's still done that way
Car workers didn't complain when robots did the dirty stuff like welding/painting, but they didn't like it when they intruded further on the line (even japa
They will Steal Old People's Medicine (Score:2)
In some circles this is also being referred to as the "Put mommy out of a job contest"
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In some circles this is also being referred to as the "Put mommy out of a job contest"
Prosperity comes from the efficient creation of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". We need to figure out a solution to inequality, but make work jobs are not the answer. If a job can be done by a robot, then a robot should do that job.
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Sometimes being able to work is more important to people than having cheap trinkets in the shops. Maximizing happiness and maximizing "stuff" may not necessarily be the same thing.
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Sometimes being able to work is more important to people than having cheap trinkets in the shops.
Many people find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment through their work. But few of those people are pickers in a warehouse.
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Ask most females who they'd rather date: a warehouse picker, or a guy who sits around all day watching TV and collecting welfare?
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Ask most females who they'd rather date: a warehouse picker, or a guy who sits around all day watching TV and collecting welfare?
...and they'll answer "the good looking one with the motorcycle".
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So people should stop buying "stuff"? That will solve Amazon's warehouse labour problem. No more Amazon.
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How did you pull that out of my writing?
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People only get satisfaction out of working for other people because they have been raised with a slave mentality and they forgot how to be themselves. They were bred to be cogs in the machine, bricks in the wall, and most people participate faithfully.
Let people be people.
We need better birth control :p
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They are usually jerks at work also.
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That might be true, but the culture is what the culture is. Republicans commonly denigrate "free-loaders" and that's not going to change any time soon. Our identity is tied to our work, for good or bad.
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Everybody wants "the loser" to "just die" until circumstances turn YOU into "the loser". Automation is slowly climbing up the education ladder; your time may come.
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Boolean?
What I got from this (Score:3)
(complete with a suction cup for lifting objects)
What I'm getting from this is, these robots suck. But they might replace some jobs due to a vacuum in the market for free workers.
Why the need to detect if you know where stuff is? (Score:1)
This thing about having a robot detect stuff and select it sounds error prone. If I was the one creating this gigantic vending machine, I would think it would be easier to put things in predictable places. (like they do in a vending machine) This way, you know that the thing in address x is a y. A step better would be to the have the robots put things away in their correct places. Some sort of easy to grab container could be used for each object to reduce the complexity of the hardware picking up the merc
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Goods are placed and retrieved at specific locations. If something's wrong a manual check and correction can be done, or maybe have one or two robots with good visual recognition randomly check locations and the contents for correctness.
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There you go - YouTube video of the iHerb "vending machine" [youtube.com]... pretty cool to it work - skip to around 1:18 to see the "vending machine" ... watch the whole thing to see how optimising the packing, before it gets stocked helps speed things up.
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Modularity.
This is their current situation. Stuff comes in different sized packages, and placement is not perfect.
Of course they could get improvements, even for human workers, if stuff came pre-checked, correctly classified and stuff. The thing is that's not their current status. The idea is to get rid of the picking human, without changing anything other than the human.
Self driving cars would be easy with the strategy you propose, just build intelligent roads, wired roads with wireless navigation, no peop
Not just robots - think packaging (Score:3)
I think the future of massive warehouses will involve RFIDs and standardised packaging. Products are packed far too randomly ... if standard packages were deployed, robots dexterity could perhaps be reduced?
chances are good? (Score:2)
Chances seem good that Amazon will ask future teams to build machines that are even smarter and faster.
The chances that Amazon will want future warehouse robots to be "even smarter and faster" are "good"?? Okay, I suppose the probability that they will want future robots to be dumber and slower is technically non-zero, but I'd at least revise "good" to "almost certain".
aww, not again (Score:1)
HAL still won't open that damned pod bay door.
Kodak Automated Warehouse c. 1975 (Score:2)
I saw an automated warehouse at Kodak in Rochester, New York, in 1975. What am I missing? Why is it so difficult now when it was done in 1975? The computers remembered where stuff was stored and the pickers just went to the spot and got the item. Some details omitted here, of course, but that was a long time ago when the relevant technology was relatively primitive.
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The Kodak system also did not store stuff in the same location every time, either. (Note that I did not say that it did.) In fact, that is the reason for my comment "the computers remembered where stuff was...." Which implies that similar items could be stored anywhere, not necessarily next to each other. I suppose that they might have simplified the actual picking process by standardizing storage bins to a few common shapes. Dunno for sure. My recollection is that (1) it was a huge warehouse and (2) each a
If I catch a robot handling my book like that ... (Score:2)
If I catch a robot handling my book like shown in the video I'm gonna wreck it and sell it for scrap.
Or mod it into my personal coffee machine.
Mobile base and suction cup? (Score:2)
Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit
The chief designer, a Dr Davros of Skaro, CA, welcomed his 'supreme victory' in the competition, but questioned Amazon's decision not to proceed with the immediate replacement of their entire human workforce with his creation: 'Do you believe that I would let a lifetime's work be ended by the will of spineless fools like you? You have won nothing. I allowed this charade to be played out for one reason only. To find those men who were truly loyal to me and to discover those who would betray me! WE... I WILL
Star Trek meets Dickens (Score:2)
If you don't have a job, you're a bum - doubly so if you are a man, just to pile on the Puritanistic guilt.
I can't recall where I saw it - perhaps the Daily Dot or the Daily Beast, but it was a map of the most common job in every state of 2015 America. The most common in total for the country? Truck Driver.
In about ten years, the only jo
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In about ten years, the only jobs left will be in the private riot police squads, trying to hold back the tsunami of the unemployed assaulting the One-Percenter citadels to extract their revenge.
Your timeline is a tad extreme, though in general I think we will see rising structural unemployment and eventually it's going to be a serious social problem.