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Amazon Uses Robots To Speed Up Human 'Pickers' In Fulfillment Centers
cagraham writes "The WSJ, combing through Amazon's Q3 earnings report, found that the company is currently using 1,400 robots across three of their fulfillment centers. The machines are made by Kiva Systems (a company acquired by Amazon last year), and help to warehouses more efficient by bringing the product shelves to the workers. The workers then select the right item from the shelf, box it, and place it on the conveyor line, while another shelf is brought. The management software that runs the robots can speed or slow down item pacing, reroute valuable orders to more experienced workers, and redistribute workloads to prevent backlogs."
...and help to warehouses more efficient by bringing the product shelves to the workers...
Do the "editors" actually read the summaries? I get this feeling that most of the new Slashdot "editors" where hired through Dice.com... Not a good sign.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfGs2Y5WJ14
In American warehouse.... goods go to you!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6Rco5A9SM
This is where everyone wins with technology. Companies get an increase in volume & works are walking less so it's easier on them.
This isn't exactly news, Wired wrote about Kiva's robots in 2009. They specifically mention Kiva's use at Zappos (an Amazon subsidiary.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
He had previous shipping-industry experience and liked the job for the first six months, but then he said the productivity rate abruptly doubled one day from 250 units per hour for smaller items to 500 units per hour.
Speed it up a little!
From TFA "the robots are not taking away any human's work yet..." What a bunch of nonsense, of-course they do, that is why these labour saving devices are there, to reduce costs, to make the system more reliable and scalable, that is the entire point and that is what people want - cheaper, faster, better service and free market capitalism driven by the profit motive, the most economically viable and thus the most moral motive is delivering. Imagine if gov't was doing this... It would be 1000 times as expensive, it would not innovate all while nobody would be allowed to compete with it and it would be paid for by taxing people that wouldn't even want it. But hey, at least it would 'provide jobs' with all the gov't perks at the expense of the rest of the economy. /. wouldn't have a story on that though, nothing to bash in the collectivist hivemind.
You can't handle the truth.
From the summary..., I figured it was a bunch of ASIMO robots programmed to trundle around the warehouses screaming in the voice of Sgt. R. Lee Ermey's voice "MOVE IT! Move it, MAGGOTS! Work FASTER!"...
Here - robots do the jobs of men.
Yes, it's incredible how Amazon is using something exactly as intended after they bought it.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
This is getting ridiculous.
until Asian robots can do it twice as fast at half the price. And then we'll have millions of unemployed robots milling around humping ATM's and washing machines.
Table-ized A.I.
Soon the picker will be automated, and then the self-driving car will deliver (or the autopilot drone)
Pretty soon the customer will be a robot too
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
As much as I love my dad and his cool job of truck driving, the self driving car might impact that line of work. Self driving semis won't be quick to hit the road until after the civilian vehicles are out. I think the public will have a bit of fear for the big ol' trucks running under the control of T2000. And to more practical ends, the way you drive a semi is different than a regular car, so the software will need to be more advanced. In the short run(5-10 years after release of self driving cars) though delivery vans will be used quite effectively.
I think if the self driving car becomes popular, there will be a certain size van that will become popular. It will be big enough to hold cargo, but small enough to be able to handle with the self driving car software. While it would not be as cost efficient for larger cargo loads, it would be cheaper for loads in its size because not having to pay for a driver is big time. I think grocery stores, Walmart, and even local distributors could use these. The nice thing about this is that any time logistics sees a boon like this, the prices consumers pay goes down even more. Lower prices for food lets people save more money to invest in other things or donate and society's advancement accelerates. So we should look forward to the self driving car.
To a certain degree, it is sad for someone to lose their job to a robot. But it is just as sad to lose your job to out sourcing of cheaper labor. The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself. The Internet gives you the ability to keep progressing in education past what you received in secondary education. And if you're a kid who hasn't graduated high school, I envy you because I wanted to take college level courses when I was in high school. Back in the early 90s, you just didn't have a way to educate yourself past what your teachers fed you outside of teaching yourself coding or something at home with limited materials. I mean you could sit down and just read through the encyclopedias as I'm sure many Slashdotters have done. But today, with the Internet, you can get a solid education if you're an active learner. If you need to be spoon fed, the Internet isn't quite there, but it is getting there.
I'm just saying there is no excuse to not be learning as your chief pass time now. You might think learning about other disciplines won't help you in your workplace. But you never know what can click in your head as a business idea when you study cross discipline. Also if you deliberately make it one of your hobbies to learn new stuff on the Internet, you might eventually have enough knowledge to be a tradesman in other fields.
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed. And what you can do with your mind will have a bigger impact than what people with a great mind could do back in the day.
God spoke to me
How is a human picker different from a nose picker?
Table-ized A.I.
mod up
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Amazon use a bunch of eliza bots if you have a problem, something small like they took your money but didn't deliver your stuff.
Try it sometime. You will never get a response that actually addresses the content of your enquiry ot complaint in the normal manner of a response. You won't seen any obvious launching point from your mail to the amazon response. What they do is run some AI algo over the content then spit out a paragraph that scores highest as a possible response. I'm sure some enqurires or complaints are dealt with effectively like this and many aren't. I just find it horrible that they pretend they have a person reading your mail when they clearly don't.
I had fun with it last time saying "If you are real breathing person, work any of the following words into the response. Nile, sausage, voodoo, estury, skycraper, forklift, logistical solutions." or whatever list came to mind. There's enough in the AI to say "I can assure you your mail is handled by a real person" interspliced in the cut and paste that does not address any point you make. It's brilliant. Its extremely f**king rude but Amazon have made it pretty clear how much they *HATE* their customers and want to screw them as hard as possible.
I guess it could be worse, they could be actually paing living human beings to enact the Eliza algorithm, selecting which 2 stock paragraphs to use in response regardless of whether it completely ignores the questions asked or the concerns raised.
"you are important to us."
I'll sing the song again. The Amazon workers displaced by robots may not be able to shop at Amazon any more. The speed of job elimination is accelerating and we are not hearing a thing about changing social policies to maintain our nation. Now take a peek at the various repair manuals that are directly or indirectly important in your life. Suppose that you need a new bevel gear for your Skill Saw. You can now print that gear or have any company that has the equipment easily print that gear, So things that are normal and usual like a parts warehouse for Skill Saws can no longer justify its financial existence. And the idea of supplying parts being part of the gain in selling an item also goes up in smoke. Even places like auto parts stores may start to dry up as 3D printing advances, Any way you look at it millions upon millions of jobs will vanish due to 3d printing. That is not a bad thing as long as we take care and design a society in which displaced workers can be safe and happy.
I could see containers being shipped via rail or water and then being taken from the shipping terminal via self driving truck along a predefined route (with a separate lane on the roadway) to places like Sysco foods, Walmart, etc. in the near (20 years) future.
Times change, and people need to retool every so often. In the early 1900s, how many buggy whip makers, gas light maintainers, ice block deliverymen, and horse tenders were needed. Time marched on and buggy whips changed to mechanics, gas light maintainers changed to utility workers and electricians, ice blocks changed to HVAC systems, and so on.
A good example of how automation has improved things is IT. IT is a narrow field, but it is a completely company/corporation run field. No unions, no pressure whatsoever against hiring legions of H-1Bs to keep the cost down, extreme tax benefits for offshoring, no pushback against replacing level 1 techs with portable hard drives with PXE servers. With all that in mind, has IT as a whole lost a lot of jobs? They have changed and new things have been added, such as VM admins and SAN admins, something which did not exist in the past. Yes, one has to be more skilled to get into IT, but one can eke out some type of living.
If IT can stand automation of anything that is repetitive, then other jobs, jobs that have unions and regulations guaranteeing employment will either not be affected, or made into less physical, more mental work.
As for truck drivers, the sooner we get autopiloting vehicles the better. AIs are just plain better than drunk, stoned, texting, tripping, high, tired, angry, horny, distracted, or just plain incompetent people.
The van size is probably variable. For a lot of areas, a Euro-van like a Sprinter [1], Ducato/ProMaster, or a Transit [2] is good enough. However, in metro areas where a FedEx van barely can go, it might be good to have a fleet of Doblos (er, ProMaster Cities), or Transit Connects, which haul less, but they can go down the back alleys and avoid the overzealous tow truck drivers and meter maids.
Posting anon... Am tired of Luddites. Either we develop technology to better ourselves, or expire as a species.
[1]: Great vans, but when they break, you pay Mercedes prices to have them fixed. Especially with the latest round of emissions stuff.
[2]: The Transit looks interesting, but it has been hit by plenty of delays. Done right, it would make for a nice campervan.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Those robots could also speed up humans by using whips.
Welcome to their robot overlords.
Sounds awesome. May we be less wasteful by the day and get more help from technology. Think more. Exert less, yet create more.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Self driving semis won't be quick to hit the road until after the civilian vehicles are out.... the way you drive a semi is different than a regular car, so the software will need to be more advanced
Citation, please. The gearing is different, the stopping distance is different, the length of the vehicle (think lane changes) is different, the turning radius is different... but these are all *variables*, not fundamental changes to the software. The biggest difference I can think of is that trucks would need additional waypoints programmed in so they'll stop at weigh stations.
On the other hand, truck drivers represent a significant cost in both money *and time*. If a truck driver costs a company $50k/year but a truck-driving computer system (hardware+software) costs $100k, the computer should pay for itself in under a year. There are limits on how many hours per day or week a person can drive a truck, to ensure they get enough sleep so they can drive safely, but the same doesn't need to be true about self-driving trucks. So a computer driving a truck can move a single load of goods cross-country faster, and can move *more* loads in a month or year.
To a certain degree, it is sad for someone to lose their job to a robot. But it is just as sad to lose your job to out sourcing of cheaper labor. The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself.
No. Well, yes, that's the key in this current economy. But the promise of robotics isn't supposed to be that only the best and smartest survive, but that the robotics eliminates work for *everyone*. Wages are supposed to keep pace as hours fall. If robots can automate half your work, the idea is that we're supposed to be paid twice as much per hour as our workload drops in half. Somewhere along the line that got distorted when profit became the driving factor, and half (or more) of the workers got laid off because robots/automation could do their work. So you're right, but you're not supposed to be. Asimov, Heinlein, et al would be furious today.
I'm just saying there is no excuse to not be learning as your chief pass time now.
Yep, that's supposed to be the goal, enabled by the robots that take away all the drudgery. Instead of spending all your energy working 40 hours/week, you're supposed to be working 20 hours with plenty of mental energy still in the tank so you can learn. But again, that ideal has been distorted, so most people are doing 45-60 hours worth of work and just don't have the energy left to enrich themselves. Even if they do, the middle class, where this *should* be happening, is disappearing, and if you're worried about money you start losing the ability to think effectively about your future.
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain.
No, it won't be a net gain. Driving truck is a (difficult, lots-of-time-away-from-your-family) ticket to the middle class for blue-collar workers. As factory jobs continue to move overseas and the real value of the minimum wage drops and drops and drops, fewer and fewer poor people can advance into the (shrinking) middle class. If you buy into the theory that the middle class is the driver of the economy (they are the people buying new cars and washing machines and houses, while the poor just try to make the rent and the rich buy an occasional painting or luxury automobile), then losing a pathway to the middle class *is* a net loss to society.
The pickers probably should start updating their resumes.
There's an Aperture science og Cave Johnson joke in there somewhere....
"and help to warehouses more efficient"
"can speed or slow down item pacing"
The nice thing about this is that any time logistics sees a boon like this, the prices consumers pay goes down even more.
Well, maybe.
Lower prices for food lets people save more money to invest in other things or donate and society's advancement accelerates.
Or to pay bills and buy food because those don't turn free when you're replaced by a robot and cease to have income. Maybe we could all become consultants.
Why would it have to wait? At 12-4am in the morning there usually is no traffic. Robots don't care if it's late at night. Auto-drive rigs can easily make the rounds. Also it's just a matter of devoting some of those fuel tax dollars to auto-drive only roads. Nice and straight, standardized markings, extra sensor targets, etc and you are good to go without needs a very complicated auto-pilot.
Big truck companies like Volvo are already putting the radar and computer vision systems from their high-end cars into trucks. The trucks cost more anyway, meaning it's a smaller proportion of the price tag, the truck operator doesn't have as much confidence in human drivers as the amateur car owner (because they get to see the real statistics of how many accidents take a truck off the road and require an insurance claim every year) and the truck cab is a big place with a lot of room for gadgets like this.
Today a brand new top-of-the-line Volvo truck, of the sort you'd buy for a long distance haulage company that cares about its drivers - will auto-stop from highway speeds when it detects an obstacle and the driver doesn't react to a warning sound. If the driver does react (because they were merely distracted and not asleep) it has everything set up to help them complete an emergency manoeuvre, e.g. sharp lane change without toppling or jack-knifing, crash braking.
Another thing long distance hauliers might be interested in is systems in which amateur drivers on a highway become "ducklings", forming an automatic convoy behind a large truck with a professional driver without any further intervention by their drivers. The truck advertises "I'm willing to be mother duck" and anybody with a compatible car can turn the system on and know they'll arrive safely at their chosen exit. That's been demo'd on public highways but isn't yet an option you can buy in the showroom. If they can get the legalities sorted out this could be a bonus for everyone - no-one likes long straight highway journeys but at least the guy at the front is getting paid to take proper rest breaks.
As much as I love my dad and his cool job of truck driving
What's cool about truck driving? There's nothing cool about doing a job that a train could do better (if we'd supported trains instead of cars, for the benefit of The People instead of the automakers, we'd have much more rail) let alone one which a robot could do better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now every worker can be fully stressed out doing routine work. As you become better at your task, your task gets faster. You'll never be on top of it.
It's like Tetris. Maybe if you manage to be fast enough to fill a whole aisle with robots, they will deadlock and need to get cleaned out.
Way to report on crap that Discovery has had a special on for a year or so. We actually covered this much better in the comments section of that stupid UAV delivery article. Great investigative reporting, here...
So it's season time again and Amazon does some serious commercial: first them drones, then the robots, etc. etc.
Funny timing to see this here, just watched Raff D'Andrea (co-founder of Kiva) give a talk on drones and discuss his future plans this morning.
Also a popular time for road maintenance, sometimes with pretty narrow detours across shoulders.
I just don't see how AI is going to deal with real traffic. Lets say traffic is diverted by ad-hoc traffic directors across the pedestrian pavement because workmen are blocking the road with heavy equipment. Is the AI going to be able to deal with that? I think until we have human level AI it will just throw it's hands up in the air and park the car far too often in real traffic, potentially in a spot where it blocks everything.
“Amazon is very secretive, when they start talking about something you better pay attention,”
A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed.
What would we do with a million unemployed truck drivers? I don't know if you actually know any truck drivers, but I do... and there aren't a lot of them who are PhD material if you catch my drift. "Learn more and get a better education and a better job" isn't an option.
Let me also point out that if there were better jobs that truck drivers *could* be doing, they'd be doing them already and we'd have a shortage of truck drivers. But we don't have a shortage of truck drivers.
It's already past the point in our modern society that we have to invent jobs for people to do. We invent crap people don't need, and advertise to sell it to people who don't want it.
The biggest reason we don't bring our military home is because it's *jobs* for millions of people who would otherwise be unemployed. That simple. It's the same reason we keep building and filling new prisons.
There simply aren't enough jobs for everyone, even when we work overtime imagining new ones. And now you'll lay off all the truck drivers. At some point, who's gonna be left with a job? How do you imagine a society to work when half the people are redundant? Sure, robotic trucks are cool, but you have to think about some consequences.
This isn't a "buggy whip" argument, either, so don't even try. That argument looks at a time in history when there actually were jobs for everyone and then some. Maybe it's more of an overpopulation discussion.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
When the car/truck explosion began, cities were cesspools of disease. Things like zoning (controlling the types of buildings and their sizes) were illegal until the Supreme Court allowed it under the justification of tuberculosis control. Everything you think you know about modern city life was basically invented in the 20th century to help ameliorate the problems. Being able to spread out into suburbs was a tremendous source of wealth and productivity.
Europe had the same problems, except they had no money to fix them. Instead, their people flocked to the U.S. Many of the rest died in two brutal World Wars. That left 21st century Europe with 19th century technology, which ironically is better suited for the 21st century.
The point isn't to make truck drivers unemployed, it is to tell the next generation,"You won't find job security in truck driving in your generation." Truck drivers will likely still be needed for 15+ years from now even if everything rolls out perfect for the self driving car.
God spoke to me
how new...assuming it's 1982.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
actually it's:
"You won't find job security in driving in your generation."
I've actually seen automated driving systems for trucks, and they work beautifully.
I suspect once acceptance happen, truck drivers will strike and cause chaos, then they will get a check for the rest of their lives even if they aren't working. Much like what happened to the men that loaded boats before the container had been invented.
Still have million+ displaced buy a system that needs, at most, 1000 people to develop and roll out and maintain.
Soon burger places will be nearly completely automated, the there are million of more jobs lost.
And of course, we will get to a place where the creation of automated systems will be done by automated systems.
The robot apocalypse is under way. Not with bullets or plasma rifles, but with economics.
That can be a very good thing if people realize that we need to move to a communi^H^H^H^H^H^H robotism society.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" will have a bit of fear for the big ol' trucks running under the control of T2000"
no they won't.
They should be afraid of the majority people operating them now.
"The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself.
towards...what? a million fewer jobs is a million fewer jobs. t's not like other avenues will open up becasue the tradition types of avenues that would open up are not down through automation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
good luck getting a train to every store...
Hell good luck getting a train to every major city.
A lot of people actually like that job, so stop being a judgmental ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
technology was supposed to free people up to not have to work.... except that the profits from such advances don't trickle down to the people, but instead stay within the company
You are so right! Nobody owns cars, or televisions, or lives in centrally-heated residences. Computers have not become more affordable for people. Nobody has running water, or access to antibiotics. The internet has not trickled down to anyone. Modern transportation systems have not been built out to any extent. If only the profits from technology would trickle down, just a little bit, we might be able to advance from sending letters written on papyrus to some more rapid means of communication. In the 18th century, the number of people with health insurance was zero; that is still true today, so it's downright strange that we're even familiar with the concept.
Damn those companies for not providing these products and services to anyone! The profits that they don't earn from providing these products and services are so misused.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Some people, when fortunate enough to gain a lot of leisure time, do spend that time on self-education, art, or other constructive pursuits. Others spend it on destructive pursuits. What's needed is a way to inculcate an ethos of desiring the constructive pursuits and reviling the destructive pursuits.
But don't blame technology. By all realistic accounts, life before technology was even more brutish than it is now.
I suppose if you show a propensity to misuse your leisure time, you should get less of it. But instead, you get more. (Time is an abundant resource for the incarcerated.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS.
You're correct, of course, but but more importantly: every new technology destroys jobs in one field, while creating even more jobs in other fields, for a net gain of jobs. Far more people have jobs today than had jobs 200 years ago -- and it's not a case of "if you have lots of babies, the jobs for them will magically appear;" it's a case of the additional jobs having been made possible by new tech.
To pessimistically focus on the lost jobs, while ignoring the created jobs which are greater in quantity and quality, creates the anti-technology mindset that infects the world's Luddites.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
FTFY: Everywhere is where everyone wins with technology.
[Explanation: every new technology destroys jobs in one field, while creating even more jobs in other fields, for a net gain of jobs. Far more people have jobs today than had jobs 200 years ago -- and it's not a case of "if you have lots of babies, the jobs for them will magically appear;" it's a case of the additional jobs having been made possible by new tech.
To pessimistically focus on the lost jobs, while ignoring the created jobs which are greater in quantity and quality, creates the anti-technology mindset that infects the world's Luddites.]
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That article is infected with an over-the-top victim mentality right from its very title. If Mac were truly a "slave," he would still be in that job; slaves are not free to quit their jobs. Everyone who accepts a job in a warehouse does so because it's the best job offer they received. Slaves, on the other hand, continue to be slaves because the alternative is to be hunted down as a runaway slave.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I'm pretty sure you haven't read the article. I can tell because you missed the fact that Mac's a she.