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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."
Why is this news? these kinds of warehouses have been around for years.
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)
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I've been seeing this kind of thing on Discovery for quite a while, for example on the plant used to refit US tanks.
Ofc tank parts aren't as sensitive to first in-first out as foodstuffs, but still, not all that sensational, is it?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Now it's the "service" jobs? Something really wonderful when the marginal pay jobs are being replaced with robotics.
/morning grouch mode <ON>
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 write off the system for the stockholders so the board can get a bigger bonus.
...why can't they PACK the items too?
Hasn't Newegg being organizing its factories like this for years?
...the robots move shelves with popular items closer to the workers... That's going to have to be a huge warehouse to make any kind of difference. I've worked in warehouses, and the limiting factor in delivering items was often finding them. Thus, the more popular an item was the faster it got delivered, as I knew right where it would be. Moving things around based on what's popular this week will only slow down the workers by forcing them to check where things are on a map- something that probably will take more time than actually walking the average hundred meters or so to the proper shelf.It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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 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 of having to pick up stuff from the shelves).
Come to think of it, a hardware store with robot delivery might be nice.
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...
* 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 asian markets and end up late in the evening waiting for the americans to wake up).
* Any advanced economy has attracked masses poor migrants looking to exploit the welfare.
* Along with immigration comes added unemployemt rates, degradation of salaries, rise on taxes for maintaining the welfare and the worsening of work conditions.
This is already happened in complete ignorance of our and your politicians. Now if a robotic society is going to develop I can't see a way to get benefits in this economic and politic scenario. Unemploed people will be kept at the brim of starvation and employed ones will be exploited to the limits.
Humans may go on strike (which is almost never a random event) and individuals may get sick, but robotic systems WILL break, and then you're dead in your tracks. Isn't this what happened to Komplett when they tried to change to a completely automatic warehousing system?
Scenario: It's the week before christmas, the most important time for your business. Your fully automatic warehousing system just broke down and things are at a complete standstill, and the expertise to fix it is busy elsewhere. Enjoy the holidays!
They algorithms for fetching stuff seems very much like the problems processor engineers have to face when developing a processor. The goal is to get something from memory (warehouse) as quickly as possible.
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 warehouse.
Memory (or disk) is the rest of the world.
Anyway, I don't beleive the long wait-time for the customer is the time it takes for the worker to actually pack the stuff, so this isn't a way for us to get stuff faster it's just a way to get more efficient "work" done per labour unit "employee"
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 generated bigger inducted costs than expected, so the zebulons were abandoned some years later.
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=lussato+z%C3%A9bulons
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
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.
My work here is dung.
Have they outlined the rules on office/warehouse relationships, e.g. robot love?
I needed these just a few days ago so I hope they build something for my home pretty soon. I prefer entertainment rather doing the regular work...
See, the idea of using robots to do repetitive tasks is to free up the population for other tasks, and to increase productivity. For those who bemoan that we appear to be working more even though we're getting more efficient, I might point out that we are working during our prime to support a life of complete leisure at a later stage in our life. 100 years ago, nearly all people worked until they were either physcally unable to, or they died - which often occurred in rapid succession. We really are working less, it just doesn't feel like it to those who are currently working. We get a second bonus that our lifestyle is significantly more comfortable that it was 100 years ago. The ability for me to keep my environment at a constant 70F, sleep on an amazingly soft but supportive bed, eat all manner of foods that would have been completely unavailable, and travel to remote destinations faster than it used to take many just to get to a city seems like a pretty magnificent feat of efficiency.
I'll be honest - I could probably work about 10 hours a week and still live better than my great-grandfather. Of course, living in a modern world on $25,000 a year would certainly preclude a lot of the comforts of modern society, but it would still be better than 100 years ago.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't know about you all, but I'm sure glad they ALSO move less popular items further away. Talk about stating the obvious! If the robots kept moving the more popular items closer to the workers, eventually the workers, merchandise, and robots would all become trapped in a rip of the time-space continuum, undoubtedly resulting in the melding of robots and humans into "one" just like BSG or The Borg on Star Trek.
Your luddite side fails to understand the irony that you just typed that on a computer and sent it over the internet.
At the end of the day, if more monkies can do less work an produce more stuff, we'd be in better shape. Sure, government will always want to find ways to tax more, but that doesn't mean they always will be able to. The printing press is what killed the monarchy and allowed the banks to become central banks; the internet is killing mass governmental democracy by questioning it to the very roots. Look at Ron Paul; that's mostly internet people. Eventually, it will be replaced with a corporate system centered around mass production of product where free speech is enforced by the fact nobody is around to kill it and the nature of reality itself is king.
You want to make the company you work for pay you good? Organize. SEC has their profit reports, if they're reporting massive profits while their workers get jack and shit, then form a union or better yet, if you're skilled labor like IT, find yourself another job. In IT, if you're good Merit and good communications skills are all you need to get places in the world and you can see 50% pay raise per year for 10 or 20 years straight if you do it right and work your ass off. Unionization illegal? Well that's TOO BAD because we've got GUNS and we're WILLING TO USE THEM! No cop is going to risk his ass for that shit. Do you think companies in the 20's didn't fire employee's for organizing labor? They were fucking terrified and the same tricks then are being used now and as people get more and more fed up they're going to organize and the companies are going to lose because they won't have the numbers.
Sure, some unions are shit like teachers unions. Don't mean you can't exercise your freedom and teach your kid on your own.
Stop whining and take some goddamn initiative!
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.
/. is near the top.
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 it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I guess the people who invented that funny little robots have yet to see a real big automated warehouse. My biggest issue with this new system is that is seems mostly twodimensional. Compare that to automated warehouses with 20 or so storage levels. Those warenhouses are also operated by robots, of course, though they run on rails and move the pallets to conveyor belts which finally transport the goods to the workers. It's not exactly rocket science to design such a system to keep the workers busy all the time, so it's pretty hard to believe that this new toy can be any faster.
But without the key figures about the speed of the system (the brochure omits them), it's hard to tell.
Seems like a business opportunity for the robot makers, have temp robots. Like you pointed out, not worth it if it isn't being used all year, but if they could have robots that were capable of learning a few different businesses and trucked to site/easily moved for several different clients.
Folks, this is OLD technology. Companies have been doing this for 15 years or more. The depot that refurbishes and upgrades the Army's M1A1 Tank uses exactly this system. It is faster, safer, more accurate, and can operate 24/7. No coffee breaks, no sick days, no union strikes, no team meetings... But let's remember, there are still humans involved in other aspects of the supply chain. Frankly, I don't understand some of the discussions that bemoan the loss of forklift operator and sorter jobs.
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 little trails making sorta a "beep, honk" as they go merrily about their business, that is until they run into some dumbass who gets in the way. Then they safely stop, so I guess they even follow part of Asimov's 1st law of robotics. ;-) Amusingly, if someone manages to stop one at a critical juncture, the whole lot of them shut down.
If my writing today sounds like dis-coherent ramblings, please realize I haven't had my coffee yet and I was up to 3 am fishing and have a cooler-full of large trout to prove it, but I've actually seen what I'm describing in person as I worked for a university's agency's subcontractor's contractor out there (or something like that) back in 2001.
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.
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 service industry anyways since we have shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas. More automation just means more of that.
The key to the question about the riots in such a transition period is that if a person can raise a family with the income of one who works at Wal Mart. Of course, if all products and energy costs were at "Wal Mart" prices then it wouldn't be a problem. Unlike the labor strikes on the 19th and 20th centuries people have great means to entertaining themselves with foot ball on there 50" plasma or the latest Halo on Xbox360.
I mean the Roman empire didn't have riots because people were unemployed and had nothing to do except eat bread and watch stuff at the Colosseum. The had riots once the bread ran out, the shows stopped, and the barbarians invaded because the Roman Emperor couldn't afford an army anymore.
The main goal of robotics is to solve all three or make it cheap enough that it is a moot point that you work at Walmart but you can still afford your 50" tv.
Of course eventually AI might get good enough to replace the people who design the TV and work at Walmart, but at that point if there are riots the robots will probaly be able to deal with a scenario by force, but hopefully someone would have the brains to program the AI in charge of manufacturing and distribution of goods to give it away for free and support humanity rather than euthanise it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Back in 1983 I joined a grocery store company as a programmer in the Washington, D.C. area that had already been running their frozen-food warehouse like this for a few years. The software was written in-house, accepted new pallets of frozen food items, placed them in empty slots in the warehouse, remembered where they were and "picked" the items as stores needed them on a FIFO basis. In this zero-degree (farenheit) storage environment workers worked 15 minutes on/15 minutes off. This system allowed the workers to stay outside in the balmier 32-degree "assembly" area where they would take the picked items as they came down a conveyer and stack them on pallets for distribution to the individual stores. The system was unique in that the robots were not guaranteed to us to work in this cold environment but we took a gamble and it paid off. We used to give tours to food retailers on a regular basis on the system itself. It was always fun to go in and watch the driverless stackers moving pallets around the warehouse. Because it wasn't humans pulling product we didn't have to worry about stacking like products near one another, the system knew where the oldest version of any particular product was located and retrieved it as necessary.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
I, for one, greet our Robotic Warehouse-operating Overlords! Let us hope that they won't be forming Labour Unions and demanding better working conditions any time soon.
Doing the hunter/gatherer thing. What started out as a nice camping trip and hike just kept expanding for a few years. It was a megahoot! I think of it as my hands on nature/biology/primitive engineering education. About like that part in Forest Gump where he goes running and just keeps going. At times it was hard, but for the most part I had a lot of free time. Winters obviously were the hardest, but not bad once you got the techniques down, shivering is a great inducement for getting creative with the local materials for shelter. What I got from it is immense, but if I had to pick the top idea, it was that our modern civilization takes clean water for granted, and it is the most important thing out there. Lack of clean potable water would be what collapses a civilization more than anything else I think. Droughts and aquifer pollution are big problems and should be a top priority for we humans in this century to "fix", to work out good methods for maintaining good supplies universally.
The linked video is overloaded with "boxes on conveyors," but there's a gem in the middle. The warehouse distribution is handled by a vertical lift system, where material containers are handed-off to robots scurrying around on the roof. The bots grab a container, then move along an orthogonal mesh of rails. The bots don't appear to be constrained to any particular track, and it's quite impressive to watch them perform collision avoidance. Very cool.
They'd like this kind of thing, keeps the unions out :)
From the www.sheeleytech.com article:
...
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 distribution to individual customers, I.E. Amazon) in the mid-late 90's however that market for such systems really began to grow. By 2000/2001 a variety of companies offered systems that could be virtually ordered 'off the shelf'. (But which were in reality custom built based on general templates.) Now truly off-the-shelf systems are starting to appear along with increasingly feature rich and functional systems.
I.E. the progression has pretty much followed a normal path of development.
Development on something like the Kiva system probably started five years ago - and more likely close to ten. (Quick check of the corporate website - founded in 2003, so I wasn't too far off.)
Working in the food distribution industry currently I can tell you this isnt that new of a product. While we do not operate anything like this but the convience of it would be unparalleled to what a human work can do. This particular item I've read reviews on NASA's use of them in the JPL where they have some 6000 odd parts they use for repairs and such. These are quite useful for varied part orders when your working with tens of 1000s of items. Where a customer may want 10 different things that can be stationed across a millon sq feet of distro center. I dont see these making it in a high moving Business to Business centers where most are ran by conveyers now and auto sorted and orders are large enough that time to grab all these different shelving would be offset. These do look like they might make an impact on internet sales distribution centers on smaller items. While the other robotic systems people seem to be talking about are ARAS systems that are robitic racking systems but they are track oriented with set leveling, the big difference is these are free to roam so to speak.
Mary Kay distribution center in Dallas had this 10 years ago. Worked on VAXes and 286s.
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. 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.
You are right on the money is saying it is OLD technology.
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 "readjustment station" if the bin they were sent by the robots didn't have what it was supposed to have.
I like doing things with my hands. The problem these days is that even the most mildly physically demanding jobs have big image problems. Even a call-center agent is seen has having the better job than the landscape contractor who makes 10 times their salary. It's not only that physical jobs are disappearing; the existing ones are being shunned.
Ingram Micro, a distributor to computer and technology retailers, has had very large automated warehouses for a while now.
Even their returns system is automated. (Dubbed "Reverse Logistics")
I worked in a 90% automated factory about a decade ago. We made automotive assemblies. There were maybe 25 fully automated robots on six lines that all served the function of creating this one product. In essence you could say that this was a 100,000 sq foot machine with maybe 50 humans feeding it.
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 each part was produced. It was sort of semi organic--maybe like being inside a Borg Cube ship or something. Two hours into the shift it was hypnotizing. If there was a breakdown of one of the robots everything just went to hell for a few minutes and it would take you a bit to pick up on it if you were involved. The result was like those stupid visa commercials where the guy pays cash and causes everything to explode around him. It was often hilarious to watch another production line self-destruct with shit flying everywhere and people freaking out over red lights and alarms.
It was industrial and I hated every second of it and was bored. So was almost everyone else. However the people and management in that work environment were decent. In spite of feeding parts and sub-assemblies into robots all day long we were treated like people. Absolutely the best HR of anywhere I have ever worked in 20 years of working. You knew where you stood and it was 10 hours of work for 10 hours of decent pay. The floor bosses were competent and fair which I suppose made this possible.
Overall that fact that you could have a decent discussion on something interesting on lunch break was the best part. With the exception of a couple of religious zealots, very few outright sociopaths were hired. That upper 20% mentioned in previous comments is what HR was after to staff the place. 200 of the 8,000 that applied were hired and sent to three months of focused College level training. Since it was Ann Arbor they probably would have 500 useful candidates a month if they were not excluding the chronic weed heads as a matter of course. The fact that this is 4% of the people who applied says that the top 20% don't often go after these jobs.
At the time I just needed a job to get through college (and that was the story of many who made it in to the shop floor.) For the Midwest the selection of the people I was working with in a blue collar environment was amazing: Lots of momma-cries-every-night-over-junior-who-could-have-been-something type slackers or college dropouts (these were usually the SMART pot heads who knew how to get through the drug tests...) A Russian scientist and his wife (chemists, both of them, I think) who came here for a job. A completely and totally bat-shit bonkers former wife of a University professor. A recently fired accountant who was a (Mostly) job functional Alcoholic. A recent graduate of the masters program of the local Nuclear Engineering department who could not find a job in the market at the time. Many, many nurses or soon to be nurses. A few ex-armed forces skilled people trying to get their heads screwed on right after the first Golf war. A bunch of married folk trying to finish college.
So, the thing is you can hire that upper 20% but these are the people who would probably get good jobs somewhere ANYWAY. It's also not going to be a very satisfying job or sustainable in that they know this is a waste of what they can do with their lives. At three years of the constant, mind numbing, droning of the machines I lasted longer than some. However I was clearly a BURNT OUT shell of a person by the time I left there. Scary, since I knew this was only a JOB to me and it still had that effect--others had decided to make this a career and were in for a long, long haul.
The company had a '20 year and out' policy with full benefits and pension at the end. Considering what 3 years did to me and most of my co-workers, I think a person would end up like Tolkiens Gollum before they made it to that point. (Grasping at their gold retirement ring and whispering 'my...precious...' in their dark basement until they meet a truly horrible end due to their psychosis.)
American consumers don't deserve robotic warehouses.
"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."
/. is near the top."
I suggest training them in the new digital economy. Look at how well it's working for the pioneers.
Yes folks, it's easier to undermine the IP economy by those who don't want to play by the rules.
"We are getting so efficient that we can more easily support those at the bottom. The question is...do we want to?"
Do WE have a choice?
"*Please don't give me shit about that comment - practically everyone on
I'll give you shit because it isn't true, and mistaking your good fortune for everyone else's is a common mistake here.
If robotic machines replace workers on a massive scale, who will be able to buy the product? Killing off your consumer base is a nice exercise in corporate suicide.
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.
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/
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
"But what do we do with people who, for whatever reason, can't really contribute in a society?"
Put them in prison.
I work at a warehouse for a retail company with thousands of stores. My warehouse supplies about 400 stores. Our system lets us send individual items as well as entire cases. This system looks useful for small orders, but for large orders it actually looks rather slow to me. We use a conveyor system, but do not keep the boxes on the main belt. Instead they are kept on rollers, and when finished are then placed onto the system. I haven't been to many other warehouses, so I don't know how they work, but in ours there is very little searching around for product. The order pickers just move down a long aisle of racks with a printout of the store's order. This is of course all in numerical order and designed for zero backtracking until a single store is filled. This robot system just looks like it makes things easier. Not more efficient and definitely not faster.
Sure is a wonderful experience. It's not the same only going out for a short time, you have to be in there for awhile for your brain to really adjust, to stop being civilized human and become just another animal living there, albeit higher on the brain scale. And yes again, what our ancestors did with primitive tech was pretty cool. I tell you something I found though that is *really* far out, you can take it as a believe or not deal. I ran across sign that there were other feral humans out there. Never say anyone, but saw the evidence. I know they were aware of *me* though. Your normal hunters and campers, etc, saw them a lot, although I stayed hidden, these other guys though, as far from me as I was from a lifelong manhattan resident in that environment. I found the basic rule of thumb is the quarter mile barrier, get much past a quarter mile from where you can drive a jeep or atv, you hardly ever see folks.
Your brain just switches after a few seasons, in particular you start unconsciously using your nose a lot more. I remember just this epiphany one day, walking by some bushes, thinking, "smell grouse", then it dawned on me, smelling grouse in the bushes is really far out! I had switched to using my nose and hadn't really realized it. Now though, lost a lot of that, still better than most guys at fieldcraft, but no way close to what was happening back then. I still have that minute movement sense, use it all the time around here on the farm, can see tiny critters really far off, stuff like that, or notice the very subtle changes in the plants and trees, beyond just "ya, that's a yada yada bush or a whatever tree". It's really kinda neat and ya I miss those days too, glad I did that extended hike. Ate pretty good most of the time too probably the most organic and healthy eating there is eating all wild foods.
...their technology is novel in a number of ways.
First is that their system deals with the combinatorial optimization problems of storage and retrieval. You get an order in from the web, and from that, the system figures out where to assemble the order. It also figures out where to store things initially, so it's very hands-off. Some of the people they have working on this have PhDs in fields relating to applied combinatorics.
Second, their system is VERY easy to set up and tear down. You can take a large concrete slab under a roof and turn it into a fully functional warehouse in 2 weeks (not kidding). Then you can roll it all back into the trucks on the same time scale. This is very effective for companies that have seasonal products or temporary needs and lease warehousing space.
Third, their system can handle pretty much any item shape/size under a certain limit. This is because they use people's hands for picking due to how terrible robot hands are at the moment.
Even when their system was young and buggy and needed to be stopped and fixed, they were still beating the throughput of traditional warehouse solutions by a long shot (as evaluated in on-site side-by-side tests by companies that were considering purchasing their system).
Yes, robotic warehouse solutions have been done for a long time... in fact there were some being worked on in the 1940's. It's not new, but Kiva has taken many ideas and refined them.
Also, their head of robotics is quite good. He lead his teams at Cornell to win many of the Robocup titles. http://www.raffaello.name/ The company has a ton of very smart people.
This technology has been around and in use for many, many years, and has been used by many companies. The last one I saw was powered by IBM series 1 computers, (I've been out of this field for a while.)
"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 write off the system for the stockholders so the board can get a bigger bonus. /morning grouch mode "
Wow! A grouch who wants to pay more for goods. Look, all these changes like RFID, automation, outsourcing isn't just because a company wants bigger manager perks, but because the consumer complained about higher prices (sometimes on slashdot even) and they got what they wanted. It's a little late to say "I don't like the consequences of my choices". Now's the time to open that wallet you closed earlier and start paying what you should have paid earlier.
I remember going to Eastman Kodak Family Day in Rochester, NY. My dad worked there (back when you held one job for your entire career). They had a robotic warehouse or two back around 1980. I stood in line so I could perform this task:
1) Look up item in a paper catalog, with help from a Kodak(tm) Employee.
2) Type the character code in a terminal and hit enter.
3) Watch through the windows while automated forklift-things sped away and returned with a pallet of your desired product.
This warehouse also had automated delivery carts. Like a golf cart that followed lines painted on the ground to deliver product around the warehouse. I was told that they never ran over people. I think my dad rolled his eyes when the tour guide said that.
I also remember signing my name on a screen and getting a printout of it and watching industrial-strength dot matrix printers print out artwork from overtyped ASCII characters ("The Wave Of The Future!") Still have Kodak schwag pens and automatic pencils that I use.
..and that's digital. Think about it, code is a combination of engineered schematics morphed with prose, it is text based robotics, text that "does stuff" and can run unattended. One of the main goals of a server is to get it set up so much you never hardly have to touch it, but it will keep chugging along, adapting itself to loads and demands, etc, text based robotic "service". And code can be sold or leased or rented temporarily or given away, same as a tangible. So we have the double precedent, biological entities as temps, and digital entities. We have cars for hire, taxis, buses, rental cars, that are temporary. We have temporary lodging, hotels, motels, RVs that are mobile. Temporary quartermaster services, restaurants and prepared take out food to go.
So..eventually we'll have rentabot! (outside of IRC and the rooshian mafiyeh)
I bet rentabrothelbot comes first, judging by human nature and all...
These have been in use for years now at the North East Distribution for Cardinal Health. It has 26 aisles with 60 foot tall racks, and the robots go from 0 to 35 miles per hour in 3 feet. They run on compaq proliant servers running windows nt and the 20,000+ boxes that it puts out to shipping with 7 people packing them in a day is equivalent to the team of 70 it took at the staples warehouse I used to work at. Cardinal's robot system is call WiTron (pronounced veetron, so I'm guessing it's a german company that setup). It is really neat to see in action.