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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."
In American warehouse.... goods go to you!
They really do bring the product shelves to the workers. Watch: http://youtu.be/gvQKGev56qU
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
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."
I get this feeling that most of the new Slashdot "editors" where hired through Dice.com
Don't be silly - they were provided by Kiva Systems.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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!"...
Yes, it's incredible how Amazon is using something exactly as intended after they bought it.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
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
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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
By moving the shelves they are able to create a queue of work for the picker, such that there is little downtime between picks. If the picker was moved, they would basically be idle while moving from shelf to shelf.
I can think of a few reasons why robots may be more efficient.
- The Biggie(tm): the time the human spends traveling in racks is wasted time that's paid by the hour. Robots aren't paid by the hour, so even if the robots are half the speed of a human, you can simply deploy five times as many robots, and now you aren't paying people for travel time between pick faces AND you're moving more product with fewer man-hours.
- Racks don't need to be human-length, allowing more storage in less space.
- Product is lighter than a person, so moving it consumes less fuel. Fuel costs are a very serious expense in a warehouse.
- Robots can zip around gathering well-organized product faster than a human can think of where to move next. And even if the robot knows exactly where to take the human, it wouldn't be able to accelerate very fast without additional harnesses/restraints for the human.
- Easier to segregate high-value product. If the robots are bringing you just the SKU you need then nobody except the facility manager has a reason to be wandering around the iPad locker, which means fewer iPads growing legs. Missing product will be noticed very quickly if there's any kind of auditing.
- Lower inventory error rate, because a robot will never accidentally pick from the wrong location. Your cycle counts and physical inventories are suddenly looking much cleaner, especially on high-volume products.
With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS. Where do you think those up-to-40% savings are coming from? Yes, storage space, fuel, rent/property taxes, and shrinkage (depending on your security) are all major expenses, but by far the biggest cost in any warehouse operation is labor. The travel time between locations is time that's no longer going into the pockets of workers.
Danish != nationality
The problem is that 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 and enter the dark shady environment of financial investments, locking up the productivity and wealth distribution.
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I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
During testing they found a serious bug with that.
The robot ferries would repeatedly demoralise workers with statements like "hurry up meatbag", "why are humans so slow" and "Ugh, why must I vocalise, cant you insipid fluid sacks learn binary". However this was deemed acceptible by the testing coordinator, the clincher was when they started pushing the human workers in the backs with rifle buts and threatening to liquefy their children to spread on their toast.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The pickers probably should start updating their resumes.
One problem is that there is no smooth transition from "here" to "there." More and more people are losing their service jobs. Manufacturing jobs, outside of restaurants, are gone already. Fast food restaurants will soon switch to robots to make sandwiches, and every customer will be happy about that. A sandwich place will be open 24/7, will be assembling sandwiches repeatably and accurately, with ingredients that you can infinitely specify, with prices that track what exactly, and how much, you consume, and with guarantee that your sandwich was never touched by dirty hands.
Another problem is that you cannot "free people up to not have to work." Humans cannot sit idly. They go crazy. Just see what's happening in ghettos, where inhabitants have too much free time and too little to do. Futurists assured us that in the future people will be working one hour per week, and the rest will be spent on art, books, travel, and other creative and pleasing activities. But nothing of the sort is happening in ghettos. People there could spend years learning the arts. Unfortunately, the only art they are interested in is the "knock-out game" violence. They don't read; they don't even speak the same language as the rest of the country does. In essence, they self-segregate. Perhaps a sociologist could say that this is a natural development, formation of tribes. But this is not a welcome development.
You could see this process in works of Vassily Golovachev (don't know if any are translated.) He started a couple decades ago with a vision of a bright future, Star Trek style, where people cooperate and achieve great heights together. But around the edge of the century he developed lots of pessimism in his futuristic vision. It became so bad that the dividing line is even visible within one trilogy (The Black Man.) What would people do, young and old, if they know that they do not matter, they are not needed, and nothing that they do has any importance? The escape into arts and culture is not for everyone. The younger people would band up together to disprove that theory - usually by forming gangs and assaulting other people for fun, just to show them who is the boss. The older people will gain control over the planet. None of that would be done to gain material wealth. It will be done only to enjoy strength and power over others, since this is not only the most powerful motive of all human activity, but also the one that no robot and no automated factory can deliver. (Unless, of course, that factory makes robot soldiers.) The social competition will continue, just on another game board, and with another figures. But the end result is always the same: domination over others. Not everyone is afflicted with this malady, but enough are.
Nah it's probably true and yet completely misleading. Amazon has increased its headcount 400% over 5 years, so it's probably true that they'll keep all the staff they currently have but cut down on seasonal hiring and not need to hire more people as they continue to grow. Ultimately it's neither a problem or their fault. Human advancement is built upon finding ways to decrease work and the reason Amazon is doing this is because we choose to buy from the cheapest company not the one employing the most people etc.
You're using ghettos as your basis for concluding that idleness leads to violence and chaos? Last I checked, ghettos tended to be full of people living in poverty and despair, hence why they live in ghettos. I'm not sure the utopian ideal of people producing art and things for the betterment of society in their idle time is based on the assumption that the people with plenty of time also happen to have no possessions, are living day to day and trying hard not to die of starvation/exposure/disease.
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.
But that puts our priorities upside down. The right thing to do is give those people what they need, not insist that Amazon find a less efficient way to do business so that it's forced to employ them in shitty jobs. Economically these options work out the same, the same stuff gets done either way, so why prefer the option that leaves somebody doing pointless extra work? Because you hate them for being poor?
Right after I'm finished telling it to the families of the post carriage drivers who lost jobs when the telegram took off, the lamp lighters who lost jobs when electric street lights were invented, and the stable hands who got laid off when the auto-mobile replaced the horse for most transportation.
It used to take the vast majority of the time and efforts of society just to find and collect enough food not to starve. It's incredibly naive and short sighted to think that the concept of farming that decreased the work in foraging and hunting vastly was somehow a retrograde step or fundamentally different from automating picking stuff up and putting it in boxes. The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
There is a (almost certainly apocryphal) story about an American economist who goes to an underdeveloped nation to try to help them improve their economy. The government guide shows him some civil engineering project out in a rural area (building a road or a bridge or a dam or something) with at least a hundred workers digging all over the place with shovels. The economist sees that there is a bulldozer sitting idle nearby, and assumes that it is broken and they don't have the technical skills to get it running. He tells the guide that they need to work with a technical school somewhere to get a steady supply of trained mechanics so that they don't waste resources like that. The guide assures him that the bulldozer works, but there is so much unemployment in the area that they can't afford to put all of these people out of work by using the bulldozer. So the economist recommends (facetiously) hiring hundreds more from the countryside, taking away their shovels, and giving them all spoons to dig with.
Getting things done and providing a safety net are two different (orthogonal, not opposing) things.