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How fast has warehouse automation occurred? What has happened to all the former warehouse workers? Fully autonomous warehouses has been a reasonable thing way b

How fast has warehouse automation occurred? What has happened to all the former warehouse workers? Fully autonomous warehouses has been a reasonable thing way before autonomous driving in the wild. It carries all the cost-saving and safety arguments. It might affect more people's jobs. What can we learn from that?

worldsayshi 5y ago
It seems to me that automating a warehouse would be a much larger relative investment than installing conversion kits into taxis.
- airstrike 5y ago
  We are easily 20+ years away from simply adding a conversion kit into a taxi to make it driverless.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    You're probably right but I feel that the incentives to create such kits would be quite big once true autonomous driving has shown to work on large scale.
bufferoverflow 5y ago
As far as I know, there aren't fully automated warehouses. Amazon ones are still employing a ridiculous number of human pickers, sorters, packers.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  And driverless cars will not be able to drive everywhere at once. Initially, it will be a few predefined routes and certain times. It will take much longer than 10 years to have a driverless car that can go anywhere, at anytime.
monocasa 5y ago
> Fully autonomous warehouses has been a reasonable thing way before autonomous driving in the wild. The issue in warehouses is that even before talking about control software behind automating, we simply don't have hardware for manipulators that are as versatile as human hands. That's why top of the line automated warehouses have sort of converged on automating everything except stations where humans can act like task reconfigurable pick and place machines. Better manipulators than biological hands is still an open research problem. Automated cars don't have the hardware barrier, and as soon as the control software meets the required error rates, we should expect a rapid switchover to automated fleets.
lp0_on_fire 5y ago
> How fast has warehouse automation occurred? When people hear that term they think of the robots that amazon installed that move product around the building for you and massive conveyor systems like UPS has for sorting packages. While those kind of machines are getting better and are slowly making their way into "smaller" companies (i.e. not the size of amazon) the biggest changes are on the ERP and data management side, tbh. Cheap/plentiful handheld devices and robust/cheap wifi tech has been a game changer for us compared to the physical processes of using paper to direct staff on the floor. The processes we used 10-15 years ago are night and day to what we use in 2022, at least in my mid-sized fulfillment company.

worldsayshi 5y ago

It seems to me that automating a warehouse would be a much larger relative investment than installing conversion kits into taxis.

airstrike 5y ago
We are easily 20+ years away from simply adding a conversion kit into a taxi to make it driverless.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  You're probably right but I feel that the incentives to create such kits would be quite big once true autonomous driving has shown to work on large scale.

bufferoverflow 5y ago

As far as I know, there aren't fully automated warehouses. Amazon ones are still employing a ridiculous number of human pickers, sorters, packers.

dntrkv 5y ago
And driverless cars will not be able to drive everywhere at once. Initially, it will be a few predefined routes and certain times. It will take much longer than 10 years to have a driverless car that can go anywhere, at anytime.

monocasa 5y ago

> Fully autonomous warehouses has been a reasonable thing way before autonomous driving in the wild. The issue in warehouses is that even before talking about control software behind automating, we simply don't have hardware for manipulators that are as versatile as human hands. That's why top of the line automated warehouses have sort of converged on automating everything except stations where humans can act like task reconfigurable pick and place machines. Better manipulators than biological hands is still an open research problem. Automated cars don't have the hardware barrier, and as soon as the control software meets the required error rates, we should expect a rapid switchover to automated fleets.

lp0_on_fire 5y ago

> How fast has warehouse automation occurred? When people hear that term they think of the robots that amazon installed that move product around the building for you and massive conveyor systems like UPS has for sorting packages. While those kind of machines are getting better and are slowly making their way into "smaller" companies (i.e. not the size of amazon) the biggest changes are on the ERP and data management side, tbh. Cheap/plentiful handheld devices and robust/cheap wifi tech has been a game changer for us compared to the physical processes of using paper to direct staff on the floor. The processes we used 10-15 years ago are night and day to what we use in 2022, at least in my mid-sized fulfillment company.