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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.
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!
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.