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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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

[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

[Maxo-Texas]

No no.. you missed the metaphor...

Humans are not buggy whip makers. They are horses.

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

[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

[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

[Cro Magnon]

No no.. you missed the metaphor...

Humans are not buggy whip makers. They are horses.

Neigh!

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: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: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.

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.