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Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear. The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28 https
by omneity 1y ago
Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear.
The demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
- krapp 1y agoThat's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are far too neat.
- wielebny 1y agoSlower than a human making one operation. Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
- vntok 1y agoSurely the robot does not stop at the end of the day.
- nosrepa 1y agoThe article says they plan on it operating continuously for 20 hours at a time.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoUntil they unionize.
- ta1243 1y agoDo robots rely on being ionized? I'd have thought a robot which wasn't ionized would work just fine
- CoastalCoder 1y agoYou're thinking of "Onionized", when their exploits are covered by one of the world's best publications.
- cusaitech 1y agoAre you talking about the "Soviet Onion"?
- dataviz1000 1y agoThe tortoise and hare allegory? Slow and steady wins the race.
- CraigRood 1y agoPart of my day job is Warehouse Automation - not Amazon!. I would agree with you on being slow, but it probably suffices to what Amazon want to achieve here. If your entire process, so stow, store and retrieve is automated, you wouldn't use these "pods". A lot of these problems seem so simple and easy to automate out, but it's really not!
- dlt713705 1y agoThe challenge is not only stowing objects. It is also optimizing space and keeping it clean. In that matter robots are faster and better.
- krapp 1y agoOptimizing space and trying to keep things neat is a futile effort. Pickers and counters are constantly pulling things out of the bins and putting them back in, and during high demand it's a chaotic mess. If there are going to be robots being this meticulous at every step of the process, then it's too slow. There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
- dlt713705 1y agoThat is why, in the end, only robots will remain. They are inexhaustible and strictly meticulous in all circumstances.
- krapp 1y agoRobots aren't inexhaustible. They break down a lot and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being.
- reverius42 1y agoThey're going to get better a lot faster than humans, though. The fact that they exist at all is remarkable.
- immibis 1y agoDidn't they say this about LLMs but we still only have highly advanced slop generators, highly advanced autocomplete, and highly advanced search? While they're impressively good in each of the aforementioned three fields, they're still not the world-changing technology they were supposed to be, right? (At least, not by themselves. When a very powerful human ties themselves to a slop machine, believing the output to be real, this can change the world) The main achievement, besides search which is a very useful application, has been in how effectively we can get real people to believe total bullshit.
- WillAdams 1y agoYeah, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse on two separate occasions: https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfillment_center_warehouse_worker/ https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi... and Inbound (or the previous person picking) was usually a bit less careful.
- usrusr 1y agoIt's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost. If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.
- bluGill 1y agoWhat skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.
- DrillShopper 1y agoFor now. Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.
- warrenmiller 1y agoHow do you get senior developers if you replace the junior developers?
- _Algernon_ 1y agoSounds like a problem for some future CEO, long after current CEO has gotten a fat bonus from improving quarterly profits now.
- mystified5016 1y agoYou don't, you slowly cannibalize your business and industry. By the time consequences show up, you've already jumped ship with your golden parachute
- dec0dedab0de 1y agoBy then the senior developers will be obsolete too
- DrillShopper 1y ago
- bluGill 1y agoNeat is very important for consistent performance. A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV) A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day. I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.
- zaphar 1y agoSlow is fast is a saying for a reason. It is just as true for a human as it is for a robot.
- potato3732842 1y agoLike every other Reddit-ism and internet worshipped rule of thumb. The reason for the popularity has far more to do with what makes a sound byte marketable to humans than it does with anything quantitative. Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle. A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.
- seadan83 1y agoSmooth is fast, slow is smooth, so slow is fast. You're applying that to the restaurant as a whole though, which makes human or robotic immaterial. The saying I do believe has a difference between robots and humans. The idea largely being that human inaccuracy increases exponentially relative to speed. Ergo, slowing down can lead to dramatically bette accuracy and throughput. Though, robots don't necessarily lose accuracy because they are moving more quickly. Though, I'd agree it is likely that both humans and robots need "smooth" in order to be fast. The key difference is robots do not always lose smooth when moving at high speed.
- esperent 1y agoI guess a spatula is a kind of blade. I was expecting something a little more exciting though, from your comment.
- djtango 1y agoHow does the robot assess whether there is enough space available in each bin?
- spwa4 1y agoIt reads the state from a database?
- abricot 1y agoIt also stowed the other items, and know how much space they take up. From the article: > “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”
- raisedbyninjas 1y agoIt appears this bot could be about 100 times simpler if they just had storage racks with smaller cubbies at the modest expense of usable storage volume. 1 item per cubbie.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoThat would be a huge expense. You would either waste a lot of space in each one, or have the robot waste time finding one that's the optimal size.
- dehugger 1y agoGenerally speaking space is the most valuable commodity in a warehouse (up to a certain height). A robot that costs 5x as much but yields 30% more usable space is a better value proposition. Also you wouldn't be able to accommodate anything besides items that fit in that specific pick bin (what a cubbie is called in the industry), meaning you would always need a near perfect match of # of bins of a specific size to the # of products matching them. It would be a continual battle to change racking as products move in and out of the warehouse. A more complicated robot is a better robot, in this case.
- LightBug1 1y agoIt's a safe space in the interim. A place where they can hone their skills and sharpen their blades.
- immibis 1y agoThis feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?
- withinboredom 1y agoFrom working on warehouse picking software way before there were robots ... it's because humans. It would take longer for a human to find space in the right space -- or instead, be lazy and forcibly put an item in a space it barely fits -- than to simply dump it into an arbitrary box with enough space and record the box. Then when deciding the path for the picker to pick items from, there's a high chance one of the purchased items is actually nearby other purchased items.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThe Kiva warehouses deliver the pods to human pickers at fixed stations. The humans just have to retrieve the product from the indicated bin without roaming the warehouse. The storage area for the pods is kept maximally packed without any aisles since the robots have their grid to operate in underneath.