Slashdot Mirror
Autonomous Forklift May Eat Up Warehouse Jobs (technologyreview.com)
Jamie Condliffe reports via MIT Technology Review: Seegrid, a provider of material-handling equipment, takes the kinds of forklifts that move 8,000-pound loads around warehouses and makes them autonomous. It does that by popping five stereo cameras on top of the vehicles, having a human drive them around to map a space, and then using image recognition systems similar to those in autonomous cars to navigate the facilities. (Unlike autonomous cars that use sensors like radar and lidar, Seegrid can use just cameras, because lighting conditions in warehouses are more consistent than those on the open road.) But while it's easy enough to have a forklift move objects from one side of a factory to another, reliably loading and unloading them poses a bigger challenge. Other robots designed to haul loads like this tend to pick things up from below, rather than spearing pallets with forks. So autonomous forklifts usually require humans to be present during pickup and dropoff to make sure nothing goes wrong. Seegrid's new GP8 Series 6 forklift has been engineered to reverse its forks into pallets, pick them up, and set them down without a human in the loop.
Another small but vital step in getting a UBI in place in this country. :-)
If I was a warehouse manager I'd be questioning the need for lights and air conditioning in a warehouse full of robots.
Clean American Coal is America's future. That and $9/hr manufacturing jobs (where we give the company $3B in tax credits for 1500 jobs)
MAGA!!
I have it on good authority by top experts on /. from previous threads about automation that there will be no job losses from automation. Also, skyrocketing productivity has had no negative impact on wages or employment. See, when it comes to labor the law of supply/demand is reversed. When demand for labor goes down it actually _increases_ its value. I know, crazy, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This means no more videos of careless workers taking down entire racks of expensive vodka!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You might get one or two 'perfect' warehouses built that use it. Amazon might etc...
But in the real world... nope. the job of a forklift operator is far too variable to ever account for every scenario.
Unless you redesign the pallet system.
And then why were you using forklifts anyway?
For years, Amazon has used robots to move shelves of goods around in at least some of its warehouses. It was initially discussed as a total game changer that would automate warehouses and eliminate jobs.
Does anyone know what''s happening these days? Are they being used in all warehouses or just a small few? Are the robots really all that plus a bag of chips? Have jobs been eliminated and if so, how many?
Let's make POTUS fulfill basic functions again!
Unless you are a brand new giga factory these won't work in your run of the mill warehouse where it is a damn tight squeeze to do anything and things stack poorly etc.
I mean, just look at the photo, 5-6 meter wide aisles! at least!!
Improved technology but there have been automated fork lifts since the '80's. To make them safe, they ran on rails or were wire guided. If they lost the guide, they stopped. Seems better than making sure none of the HID lamps starts flickering.
Anonymous forklift operators from R9k1 would be an improvement with 0-population growth benefits. And they dont waste precious water in all those showers, practically self-greesing cheeto-powered dependents.
I hope they name the autonomous forklift system "Klaus".
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Most Trump supports stick forks up their unemployed uneducated inbred incestuous angry white male asses. FTFY
Back in 2014, a company I worked used autonomous forklifts to pick up materials at the end of the lines and transport them to a palletizer area. While the concept was great, the solution was poised to fail. Unless the autonomous guided vehicles (or AGV for short) were in a no human area, their operability was severely impacted: they had to stop for traffic, they had to run in slower speed and people would sometimes be in their way. Long story short (and a few million dollars down the sink), we scrapped the AGVs in favor of the old man power. Which was sort of unfortunate: we should actually get rid of the ones making the system to fail, but hey, there were unions unhappy with our AGVs anyway. One thing we can at least say is that no accidents during the 4 years of the AGVs operation were caused by the AGVs. People, on the other hand...
Would only work if you only need to move a pallet to a location. I work in a warehouse, the robot would have to be able to remove pallet from a slot, and move the remaining cases into the slot after the new pallet is put in. Simply could not work in the warehouse I work at.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fully+automated+warehouse+system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKA98_vKs8A
Horseless carriages may put buggy whip makers out of work. The horror.
good job sjwdot
You are clearly a conservative, here is something called a source and it says the opposite. ://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/09/how-we-voted-by-age-education-race-and-sexual-orientation/
http
I've seen these for several years at a Chinese CM. They drive slow, xfer finished goods to storage, and "sing" as they drive. If a user comes near, they will slow or stop. They feel very gentle
and when jail / prison is better then living on street with a lot less rules / paper work to get free food / board / doctors etc under all of the in place welfare systems.
and states will ban SNAP at the self checkout so that Walmart will have to keep real cashiers on the pay roll.
Until soylent green is more profitable than
But I'm having a hard time imagining 8000 pound loads. I mean I only worked with supply chain management for about 20 years and it was amazing to me that automated systems could store boxes in carousels (and retrieve them as well) and even drop boxes of pills into totes for drug stores but I don't think that even the pallets being loaded on trucks weighed anything close to 8000 pounds.
Maybe they were - meat is heavy but even when I worked for a protein provider (otherwise known as an abattoir) a cow only weighs about 1000 pounds (actually less I think especially after being disassembled and put into boxes).
I don't think I ever saw a forklift carrying 8000 pounds. We were usually more concerned about how much space it took up.
Of course the trucks that they were loaded on to carried much more than 8000 pounds. Wake me up when those are automated.
Labor standards were a big issue both for our customers and the unions though. We had engineers who mapped warehouses and determined how much time it should take someone to pick all the product that was being received or shipped out. We calculated the shortest path, determined how much time someone should take to traverse it and how much time it should take for them to pick an item.
Complete automation was always the dream and I'm sure it still is. The fewer human hands that have to touch something in a warehouse, the more efficient it is and the fewer mistakes that will be made - unless us developers totally screw up. (And we sometimes did)
But at least robots don't steal products off the shelves (or do they?)
And for reference I looked up how much a pallet can hold.
https://greenwaypsllc.com/how-...
4700 pounds,but I'm sure most pallets don't actually need to carry anything near that weight.
But forget weight, the automation is the exciting aspect of this, but even in the '90s there were automated picking machines that could go down an aisle in a warehouse and grab pallets off shelves 50 feet in the air.
I'm sure there is some need for pallets that can hold 8000 pound loads - that link I just used shows a pallet of brick for example.but your typical retailer like a grocery store or a drug store or Best Buy isn't shipping things that weigh that much.
A warehouse without people - that is the dream.
IF Republicans were better educated, Trump obviously wouldn't appeal with is odious lies, self-contradictions, malapropisms, et al.
You're a fucking nazi faggot, admit it.
Trump only got 46% of the votes.
Actually yes giving $9/hour workers SNAP is better than forcing their employers to pay them more. For one thing their employers would fire them and replace them with robots if they had to pay them $10 .. if they could pay $10 why didn't the workers ask for $10 and refuse $9. And secondly why should companies willing to hire be the ones shouldering the expense of the workers? It's society's fault that the job market is so terrible that the workers are forced to work for $9. Presumably the mere existence of a worker willing to work for $9 takes away a job for the guy who would only agree to $10. In other words, forcing the wage to $10 means somebody will still remain unemployed and a welfare burden. Except now his life will be perceived to himself as even more desperate because now he has a bigger inequality. Anyway, then when the unemployed turn to a life of crime and drugs we have to give those workers free room and board in jail (which in many states costs more per day than staying at a five star hotel). So yeah taxpayers paying the SNAP for low wage workers is worth it.
Ellen Ripley from the future: Nooo, they took my space forklift job! Future imaginations always seem to be too conservative due to the mandatory familiarity factor.
More deplorables out of work and, having no real skills and no intellectual abilities whatsoever, starving to death. The working class has betrayed the Left's ideals and must pay for it.
The autonomous forklifts starts by eating all the jerbs and finishes by eating up all the goods it was supposed to move around. Never trust a hungry robot.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
I've seen larger units implemented with pulling pallets off of a powered trailer and moving them into an automated racking system. But due to speed of them vs traditional fork lifts, they still have autonomous and human driven side by side. On their outbound side, they have autonomous fork lifts but still use traditional instead due to the speed and complexity of loading a standard trailer.
The last 'free' pre-WW2 German federal election was held on March 1933, which is -after- Hitler had already become Chancellor. The nazi party got only 43.9% of the votes.
A few months later, Germany was a one party dictatorship.
Amazon's machines that move racks to order fillers and return them to a place are really forklifts The kiva machines are essentially forklifts that carry the shelves on their heads. So all this idea is to increase the weight carried.
One good thing that would come out of this is that the autonomous forklift wouldn't use somebody's crates as an alternate set of brakes. You'd also eliminate forklift operators' propensity to practice jousting on crates.
If a human needs to be around to watch it, why can't that human drive it?
Actually yes giving $9/hour workers SNAP is better than forcing their employers to pay them more. For one thing their employers would fire them and replace them with robots if they had to pay them $10 ..
So... Either way we all get to pay for them?
if they could pay $10 why didn't the workers ask for $10 and refuse $9.
You're asking why people who probably have no other marketable skills think they could successfully demand $10/hour when there's a line out the door of people willing to take $9?
And secondly why should companies willing to hire be the ones shouldering the expense of the workers?
Wait. What? The company that needs their "skills" (what little they may have) shouldn't shoulder the expense of paying them? I don't get any benefit from them working for Walmart or Foxconn. Why should I subsidize their pay? Or you even, for that matter?
It's society's fault that the job market is so terrible that the workers are forced to work for $9.
If by "society's fault" you mean we had lying presidents that sold tax cuts for the rich as good "Trickle Down" economics, claiming that the rich would invest their tax savings and create jobs. And policies that allow corporations to ship jobs offshore rather than keep manufacturing, with "good" manufacturing jobs, here. E.g. as Germany has done. And other presidents that looked the other way while Wall St. ran history's biggest Ponzi scheme.
Presumably the mere existence of a worker willing to work for $9 takes away a job for the guy who would only agree to $10. In other words, forcing the wage to $10 means somebody will still remain unemployed and a welfare burden.
So instead of one person who can feed himself and one who can't, now we have two who can't feed themselves! Ironically livable minimum wages in other capitalist countries – e.g. Australia and most of Europe – don't seem to result in businesses that can't make a profit. But here we just keep repeating the lie that paying a living minimum wage doesn't work. When what it really means is that the business owner might have to pocket slightly less in profits than he or she might otherwise have been able to.
Except now his life will be perceived to himself as even more desperate because now he has a bigger inequality. Anyway, then when the unemployed turn to a life of crime and drugs we have to give those workers free room and board in jail (which in many states costs more per day than staying at a five star hotel). So yeah taxpayers paying the SNAP for low wage workers is worth it.
Looks like you went to the same school of economics as Twitler and Rick Perry.
Seegrid have been around for years. This is not news - just slash-vertising :-/