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."

Comments

I've seen something like this

[Biotech9]

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...

Re:why is this news

[macdo10]

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...

This Is Because of Immigration Laws

[eldavojohn]

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.