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Autonomous Forklift May Eat Up Warehouse Jobs (technologyreview.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the automated-tasks dept.

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.

7 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks Seegrid! by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re: Thanks Seegrid! by saloomy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!

    2. Re: Thanks Seegrid! by saloomy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re: Thanks Seegrid! by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
    4. Re: Thanks Seegrid! by saloomy · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. Re: This is obvious hogwash by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  3. Re: This is obvious hogwash by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No no.. you missed the metaphor...

    Humans are not buggy whip makers. They are horses.

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.