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.

Comments

Thanks Seegrid!

[FunkSoulBrother]

Another small but vital step in getting a UBI in place in this country. :-)

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[saloomy]

See grid is late to the game. At my former employer, I was part of a team who helped implement fully autonomous warehousing using human-less forklifts.

A video of them in operation

It wasn't about the labor savings. The ROI was far out compared to payroll of forklift drivers. It was the perfect loading of trucks to balance the loads on the trucks, the reduction (practically the elimination) of damaged goods, and the accuracy in knowing where the product is and how much was in stock at all times, with no errors.

Also, with this system, the downtime is spent "housekeeping". We could front the product that has an upcoming scheduled pickup time and get it close to the relevant dock door. This reduced loading times, reducing "accessorial charges" that trucks make you pay if you keep them for over a certain amount of time, and allowed the distribution center to ship more product in a crunch than humans could possibly hope to achieve.

Oh and they turn up for work more consistently, take fewer breaks, and operate at a steady calculable rate, so planning knew how many trucks they could get shipped, emphatically!

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[TWX]

I wonder how many people can be impaled on the forks of a forklift while it still is used to carry the spoils of looting?

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[sonamchauhan]

Like SeeGrid, does your solution use stereo cameras?

I've heard bad things about autonomous vehicles basing their navigation on cameras + software processing (a la Tesla):
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

That is, as compared to Uber, Google and practically everyone else (who use LIDAR and other more 'reliable' sensors).

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[backslashdot]

With automation you won't need UBi. You can just get the upcoming VW self driving electric ID van and drive around the country parking for a few days in one paper to let its solar panels charge your battery. If you don't own some land (to setup an indoor automated farm), you can forage for food or eat at the automated soup kitchens or get a fishing robot. As for showers .. hmm how do the wild animals do that? Ok you may have to trade things you foraged with people who know how to make soap. Internet? Mesh network with others. My point is in the robot utopia you may not need UBI. If it's there great. Everything will be fine as long as we have public land and nobody takes our rivers away. Vote wisely.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[saloomy]

No. It uses lidar, with mapping. There are 360 degree reflectors around the warehouse. The lidar reflects off these and form. Pseudo star-navigation field for reference points. Filling in a truck is done my counting steps on the wheel drives.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[LordWabbit2]

Agreed, my sister works for a large retailer and she was part of their team to implement automated loading. In their case however a lot of it WAS purely to remove the human element from the equation.

The reason being is that every year during the xmas peak times the forklift drivers would strike and demand higher wages. That forced them to get in part time workers to at least keep stock moving, of course the strikers don't like that so often there is violence and they have to get private security to protect the part time workers (often school kids on summer break - yeah it's summer here over xmas).

Also theft (or "shrinkage" in retailer talk) is bad enough that it was also a contributing factor in removing humans from the loop. Some of the stock still needs humans, but all the dry goods are automated, and they are looking at automating the rest.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[CaptnCrud]

the last one was clearly a setup.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[saloomy]

They really don't "reboot". They do lose track of the star map, but they roll forward to reacquainted them. The edit I think is just shotty video editing. The worst thing that would happen is that the forklifts would get into an error condition because it's return path was obscured by debris or a malformed pallet would collapse. Probably happened about once a month, and maintenance would hand clean up the mess.

These units have a hand-control on their back so you could take over them and move them along, if you needed something obscure done. However, we programmed them to do just about EVERYTHING from retrieving raw materials to fetching pallets. The only thing you really had to handle by hand is when a part came for a machine that had to be forked to the machine so it could be installed. They were vastly more reliable than the Linde lifts they replaced, and those were Cadillac quality.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[sonamchauhan]

Ah, swell - thank you.

If I understand correct, the lidar is mounted on the vehicle, not at a fixed spot - right? How do 360 degree reflectors interact with it?

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seegrid uses LiDAR for safety only, so the robot doesn't hit anything or anybody. Their localization and route following is entirely vision based, with no reflectors or other special infrastructure like lines, fiducials, wires, or bar codes. The vision sytem uses landmarks that are already in the facility, like racking, lights, and support columns. That's Seegrid's real strength, the vision software that Hans Moravec has been working on for decades.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get this into your head. There won't ever be UBI. First off, it's stupid for the same reason that school vouchers are stupid--it will just cause prices to rise to where it's meaningless.

Second, and most importantly, people don't want to pay you to work (and traitors to the human race here celebrate and enable it). How brain dead do you have to be to figure out that they're not gonna pay you to NOT work? You think you're so valuable doing nothing that the world gives a damn about you?

No, the only cure for this is going to be the (probably violent, unfortunately) return of our economy to human scale endeavours. The guy who runs a local hardware store or pizza joint isn't going to buy robots, not for wholesale labor replacement anyway. Home warehouse stores and pizza chains will. Guess which is better for local economies with real people?

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[ranton]

Yeah, there will be widespread looting and crime well before a UBI happens. OP will probably be murdered by an angry unemployed man.

This is probably when the most egregious privacy violations will begin in the name of public safety. The current liberal mentality which is generally against police overreach and brutality can only exist in a world where most people of means do not fear crime. If the upper middle class in their wealthy suburbs start to fear looting and violence, a police state will soon follow.

I pay about a tenth of the cost of a police officer in property taxes each year, and I have a relatively modest home in an affluent suburb. If I had to pay another $10k in property taxes to protect my children and property it would be a small price to pay compared to how quickly upper middle class wages have been going up in the past decade. There is plenty of money in the hands of the affluent to pay for protection if necessary, and the loyalty of that protection will only increase as job opportunities diminish elsewhere.

Re:Thanks Seegrid!

[GameboyRMH]

Either UBI, or killbot-powered genocide of the working class...one of those is closer.

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who decides what level of automation is too much? Using a forklift, for example, takes away jobs from a team of people who could have been hired to lift the object. What about an electric fan? In ancient rome, a human used to have the job of waving a fan to cool people down. Textile making, humans used to be heavily involved in it .. now machines do it. Do we want to tun off those machines?

Whose job is valuable and whose isn't?

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[Kristoph]

It wasn't about the labor savings. The ROI was far out compared to payroll of forklift drivers.

The Seegrid solution provides much more favorable ROI - 1 to 2 years - specifically because the devices can be deployed without 'a team who helped implement fully autonomous warehousing'. In fact, the units that just "drop and return" don't require any sort of skilled person at all, a warehouse worker can just walk them around the facility and they 'learn' where they need to go and how to get there. That's a big deal because once your warehouse has a specific role for a unit like that you can just get one, teach it, and you get a solid return on investment quickly - it's not just for big companies with giant warehouses.

This is really the innovation here: robots that can be delivered and taught their job without expansive ( and expensive ) implementation efforts.

Re:Thanks Seegrid!

[irrational_design]

I don't understand where the money for UBI will come from. I don't have many needs other than food (cereal and milk or p&j sandwiches would be just fine), a bed, and a library card. I'd gladly quit my 6 figure salary job to get paid to lay around and read all day every day. I'm sure I'm not the only one. If far fewer people are paying taxes - who will provide the funds for my UBI?

This is obvious hogwash

[rsilvergun]

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?

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

You understand that if a company does not adopt this technology and its competitors do, it will be forced out of business, right? Then everyone in the company loses their jobs. Fighting against the tide of technological advancement is a losing proposition. You either embrace it or perish. Plenty of people will have jobs building and servicing these robots, and as the company expands the former forklift operators can be reassigned into other roles. #MAGA #TRUMP2020

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Entrope]

Buggy whip makers and other cliches would like to have words with you.

The argument is essentially always that automation will lead to dislocations and role changes, but the humans in the process will be doing more productive or less common work -- managing the production line, or programming the robots (maybe by simply demonstrating the pattern, or entering the pattern on a computer), or installing and repairing robots, or something that humans do better than robots.

Don't be that asshole who claims victory over a straw man.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Maxo-Texas]

Buggy whips were not replaced by electrically powered artificial humans who cost less than $40,000 per year per shift.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[ShanghaiBill]

skyrocketing productivity has had no negative impact on wages or employment.

Productivity is not "skyrocketing". It has stagnated.

When demand for labor goes down it actually _increases_ its value. I know, crazy, right?

Nobody believes that. You are being obtuse. What economists believe (with plenty of evidence) is that rising productivity does NOT reduce demand for labor, it increases it. This is known as Jevon's Paradox, but it really isn't a paradox at all. If you are a factory owner, and you are installing machinery that can double the production of each worker, and double your profits from each worker, would you fire half of them, or hire more?

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Entrope]

You're right; they were replaced by nothing, because automobiles made horse-drawn buggies essentially obsolete. What was your point? Mine was that rsilvergun presented such a distorted version of the march-of-progress argument that it's hard to see any good faith behind presenting the distorted version.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[BoogieChile]

Is demand for my product expanding at the same time as the amount of product I can supply? If not, then keeping my existing workforce is going to result in a whole bunch of excess inventory that will need to be warehoused.

So, I would fire half of them at first, and then hire them back again when I have a need to be able to produce more.

Or, you know, just upgrade the robots to version 2.0

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Maxo-Texas]

No no.. you missed the metaphor...

Humans are not buggy whip makers. They are horses.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[ShanghaiBill]

Is demand for my product expanding at the same time as the amount of product I can supply?

Historically, that hasn't mattered, becaus productivity improvements happened broadly across the economy. So even if demand for some particular product is fixed, there will be many more that see increased demand as production costs fall, and there will also be new products introduced based on the new technology.

Increased demand for labor in the face of rising productivity is not some ivory tower theory. It is based on historical reality.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

Horses make great glue!

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Entrope]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we should not analyze the economy as if it were a GDP factory.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[swb]

I don't think the economic arguments are necessarily wrong about the macro effects of change.

The problem lies in the clinical language of "dislocation and role changes" of labor, as if labor just gets a slip of paper that reassigns them to another job in a different place. This is a major gloss over the fact that these are real people, often at later stages of careers, who practically can't "just go get another job" doing something completely different.

It's compounded by the fact that the profits from these changes go to the owners of capital, while the burden of dealing with the unemployed worker with no career options goes to the state.

And the rate of change is accelerating to the point that neither labor nor government can adapt fast enough. Even the buggy whip industry had several decades to adapt, especially if you consider that as an industry the buggy whip industry wasn't even around that long; buggy whips existed for centuries, but were probably not organized on an industrial basis until the mid 19th century.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Entrope]

Maybe you think "dislocations" is a clinical term. I don't. It's merely shorter than writing that a lot of jobs will go away, and people will have to change careers or fields, with a lot of uncertainty and possibly retraining. It is obvious enough what online shopping (exemplified by Amazon.com) is doing to retail; it is not at all obvious what people who used to work in retail should do instead.

There are a lot of hard questions about how to handle advancing automation and radical changes in technology, but reducing an opponent's argument to a straw man is not a helpful way to address those questions, and that reduction was what I was primarily objecting to. It's hard enough to have a serious discussion about the topic, in large part because people take different things on faith (like the ageist assumption that older people "practically can't 'just go get another job'", or the idealist assumption that more automation will lead to a significant number of more specialized jobs), that we really don't need bad-faith arguments added to the mix.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Gr8Apes]

In this case: Soylent Green.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[bluefoxlucid]

It's kind of an argument between "knives don't cause wounds" and "any contact with a knife will leave a permanent, bleeding wound and you die!"

Technical progress reduces labor. It boots people out of jobs. This also reduces the cost and, thus, risk of entering and operating in a market. For higher-cost goods, you expand your market, moving luxuries down to commodities. The same pressures that set the price point before (competition, consumer interest) create a new price point. Consumers will tolerate something costing $50 if the best price they can get is $48; but if the next guy in town has it for $30, they're leaving your store and going to his. They might not leave your state for a 5-hour drive (but hey, Ebay, Amazon...).

Prices don't always come down. For a core basket of goods, the Fed indexes inflation and prints up money to make sure prices go up; wages just go up slightly-faster. For some other goods (notably cars and electronics), people buy at a certain price point relative to their income, and manufacturers keep moving more tech into the bottom end and thus provide that price point with ever-increasing features, thus maintaining the same usage of the labor pool per unit of product (look at the history of standard features in cars). New goods tend to be luxury goods, and comparable goods tend to index against each other, so of course a $5,000 OLED 55-inch TV becomes a $3,500 TV, compared to a $500 LED IPS--and it will eventually be a $500 OLED IPS.

So yes, you're going to see a loss of jobs.

That thing where prices come down--where the proportion of middle-income spent on a product shrinks--leaves people at every income level with left-over spending power after buying the same things. Nothing is zero-labor, and so buying more stuff invokes additional labor. Even self-driving freight trucks and automated warehouses need some form of logistics management, some (minimal) IT behind them, electricity generation, maintenance, all the mining of materials and fuels that goes behind that, and so forth. Load on supporting infrastructure increases, and we suddenly need both high-end engineers and low-end basic labor.

So what really happens here?

Well, if you eliminate 20% of the jobs in 6 months, the economy doesn't even hardly keep up. Welcome to the Great Depression! Even my Universal Social Security probably won't hold up against that very well--it might not even weaken the recession enough to stave off the dire consequences. It'll let Americans shrug off the Great Recession no problem, but anything significantly-larger would be an ... interesting academic study, albeit a painful one. America might collapse as a nation despite any effort I can come up with.

If you eliminate 20% of the jobs over 3-4 years, the economy might sweat a little up-front, and it'll make pace with the rate of change before the end of the first year. You'll start on a mild recession, and then start holding it back, and then start recovering while the recession is trying to get worse.

One of these looks just fine from the perspective of national economy, but you'll get hell from the truckers and warehouse workers who lost their jobs. Everything is not fine for them; it will be in a little while, or else unemployment will go up and up and up as your economy dies, but up-front they're going to be carrying the load. Let's also not forget that we face around 5% unemployment constantly, so they're all tossed in a pool with other people who are trying to recover--as individuals, any of them could get left behind.

That' why we need welfare systems: we're all getting richer off the backs of a few unfortunates. When you buy a product, you must pay enough to generate revenue to cover all the wages involved for the time spent per-unit by every human involved in making that product. Get fewer humans to do it and the prices come down, and now you can buy two things; and there's a little gap in there where you're getting

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[bluefoxlucid]

Is demand for my product expanding at the same time as the amount of product I can supply?

You found the demand-side argument! Euer Gegener made the trickle-down (supply-side) argument.

So, I would fire half of them at first, and then hire them back again when I have a need to be able to produce more.

This is why we need welfare.

Also ShanghaiBill got the more-complete argument, but you're both on the right page. Slashdot is actually doing pretty well in economics this morning.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[bluefoxlucid]

What if ... there's less risk ... because it's less-expensive to make a thing ... and so you can either expand a luxury good into a broader market, or you can undercut your competitors and capture more of the market for massive profits?

How do you think the prices got set in the first place? Do you think consumer demand sets a maximum price and is fixed regardless of what prices at which a product is available?

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you? A forty year old middle manager envious of the younger kids that surpassed you into VP/director/CEO positions?

These systems are already in use. If XYZ company is incompetent and can't get it to work, they fail. If they do get it to work they either a) get to take home much higher profits or b) reduce prices to compete.

Either situation is good because now you have higher economic output per person. Either everyone buying the product gets it for less and has more money to buy other goods OR there is a set of rich company owners who now have more money to spend. The unemployed *at this job* can now work for the company owners in some OTHER, previously non-existent capacity or can invent something to sell the general population that now has more money.

This exact thing has been happening since the dawn of human civilization and is how we went from 100% of our waking hours being related to surviving to now barely any of our time is surviving and the rest is "extra" economic output - entirely made to fill the time void created by our basic needs being met. The remaining time is spent on arts (music, movies, TV, photography, painting, literature), entertainment (hundreds of sports, video games, parties, events, etc.), hobbies, services (hair styling & coloring, fancy restaurant food/service, electronics, appliances, unnecessary upgrade to necessities (fancy homes, fancy drinks, fancy food) etc.

You are an idiot if you think this "extra" component won't continue to expand since it is already probably over 95%+ of economic output if you strip out unnecessary components (e.x.. a home/hotel built with marble or eating a fancy restaurant meal are not necessary)

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about the supply/demand for labor? As long as the GDP remains constant, there's enough to go around. The problem is figuring out how to distribute it fairly when the robots do all the work.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[calken1979]

Yeah, this automation is rubbish and costs jobs. Let's get telegrams and telephone exchange operators back in. Automation tends to remove one job from one location and creates it in another. As the article states, ROI is not though labour cost reduction but planning, management, scaling and data errors.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

But of course in today's world a majority of the "owners of capital" aren't Daddy Warbucks sitting in their mansions sucking up profit from the work of the little people, it's workers with individual retirement plans that invest in mutual funds that own stock. That makes them the "owners of capital". About half of all workers in the U.S. own stock, either directly or through their retirement plans.
So rants about "owners of capital" taking advantage of the rest of us are pretty hollow.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

I have it from good experts that sarcasm isn't a useful way to try and make a point. People with a decent point to say, just say it, with out the added bullshit to give them cover if they are wrong.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Cro Magnon]

No no.. you missed the metaphor...

Humans are not buggy whip makers. They are horses.

Neigh!

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[thomn8r]

The problem lies in the clinical language of "dislocation and role changes" of labor, as if labor just gets a slip of paper that reassigns them to another job in a different place. This is a major gloss over the fact that these are real people, often at later stages of careers, who practically can't "just go get another job" doing something completely different.

This reminds me of a conservative radio piece I heard where the guest suggest that travel agents, who are becoming obsolete, should just become app developers, because that's the hot new thing where they need people.

Sad!

[Ol Olsoc]

This means no more videos of careless workers taking down entire racks of expensive vodka!

Re:Sad!

[rtb61]

Nope, just videos of hacked forklifts chasing down and forking the boss and the rest of the board.

Re:Sad!

[Ol Olsoc]

Nope, just videos of hacked forklifts chasing down and forking the boss and the rest of the board.

Ah, so you see the good in everything. 8^)

Re: Well, it follows...

[Entrope]

Camera-driven robots will need good lights at least as much as humans would, but robots can carry them around. A/C could be eliminated in a lot of the world, but most electronic assemblies are only rated to operate up to 40 (for commercial) or 50 (for industrial) C ambient temperatures. If outside temperatures get close to 50, some site-wide air handling would still be required.

Re:Impact At Amazon?

[Cyberax]

Kiva robots are the backbone of Amazon warehouses. Humans are still needed to pack things and put them on the shelves, but robots automate the most labor-intensive part - getting the required goods to packers.

Re:Well, it follows...

[ShanghaiBill]

Many warehouses don't have ACs now. As they switch from fluorescent to LED, they often use motion sensors, so the lights are only on if someone is in the aisle. One solution for SDFLs is put the lights on the FL.

Re: Doubt it

[Nidi62]

And as soon as there is a backlog and you have freight sitting on the ground or spilling over staging/holding areas and the premapprd layout goes to hell the automated forklift is useless.

name of the system

[TWX]

I hope they name the autonomous forklift system "Klaus".

Re:Seen that, was not impressed

[schematix]

I am semi-involved in a similar AGV related project now. The AGVs execute their tasks pretty well overall, but when you have a factory where they shoe horned in an AGV solution, the whole thing turns to grid lock. However in new factories where there is clear forethought about the flow of materials through the ware house it can be configured so that AGV traffic is appropriated segregated and dedicated areas are made for them so they don't interfere with people or each other. It's definitely a weakest-link system, and that weakest link is not on the automation side.

Re:Impact At Amazon?

[Maxo-Texas]

And amazon is well down the road towards developing robots that pack things and put them on shelves.

and when jail / prison is better then liveing on s

[Joe_Dragon]

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 t

[Joe_Dragon]

and states will ban SNAP at the self checkout so that Walmart will have to keep real cashiers on the pay roll.

Automation of warehouses is amazing

[No Longer an AC]

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.

Re:Automation of warehouses is amazing

[Tristfardd]

This was being done in the '70s. The term was 'automated inventory control'. General Automation did the project, I worked for them at the time. John

Re:Automation of warehouses is amazing

[Shotgun]

I was working a dock in Greensboro, NC before college, and had to load rolls of carpet that night. The forklift had a 20ft steel poll sticking out that was slid down the center of the 4ft high roll. I had to sit way back in the seat to get enough weight on the rear tires to steer. The trailer did not line up with the dock, but was about 6in higher. I had to get a running start to get up the slight ramp, and when I hit the top, precariously balanced on the front wheels, the forklift was bucking as hard as any bronco ever had.

The trailer was level with the dock by the time I was done. That was a fun night.

Re:Impact At Amazon?

[Falconhell]

Saw a show on Dubai airprt. The bagage handling system is awesome
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

Disaster waiting to happen

[volodymyrbiryuk]

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.

Re: Doubt it

[Whorhay]

The more you automate all of this though the less likely you are to have such problems. The robot fork lifts won't try to overfill a staging area as they'd just stop once it is filled. Or maybe you do program them to automatically extend the staging area, at which point they'd know where the boundaries of that area are, while stacking pallets neatly within it.

A few useful benefits

[RogueWarrior65]

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.

Re: Doubt it

[Nidi62]

Having worked in a warehouse driving a forklift, sometimes that's simply not an option. Our facility only had racks for some freight that was terminating locally. Everything else (including terminating freight by large, regular customers) had floor holding/staging areas. All it took were a few large shipments , a delayed pickup, or an oversized item and a lot of these staging areas would be full. There were times when we had twice as much freight as could fit in the staging area. And freight is not always uniform in shape: a couple irregular pieces can make navigating through it a huge mess. Simply mapping an area once and using cameras to drive through wouldn't work, it would have to constantly remap the facility.

Re: Doubt it

[Maxo-Texas]

Read upthread of already implemented and successful warehouse automation projects and you'll see humans create more problems (theft, striking at just the perfectly wrong time, violence) than the ones you propose.

The "weak" point becomes the non-automated trucks.

Not news

[hvidstue]

Seegrid have been around for years. This is not news - just slash-vertising :-/