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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."
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.
Yes, it's incredible how Amazon is using something exactly as intended after they bought it.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
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
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
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.