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It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse. The later is a much easie
by philipwhiuk 1y ago
It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse.
The later is a much easier problem.
- alsodumb 1y agoIt takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.
- sschueller 1y agoHumans are cheaper than robots too...
- thfuran 1y agoHow much cheaper? You can hardly get humans to work two shifts a day, let alone three.
- bluGill 1y agoOnly sometimes and costs change over time. The first robot is almost always more expensive than a human, but the second robot comes after the design is done and so it generally cheaper than the human (accountants will figure out how to amortize these costs and thus give us a better picture of costs.) Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
- abricot 1y agoOnly if you don't need to pay them a living wage.
- econ 1y agoI've picked orders. If I have to touch your purchase for 20 seconds it is a very long time. There are 180 chunks of 20 seconds in an hour. If the pay is $45 per hour it would cost 25 cents. It is strange how this isn't obvious
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CamperBob2 1y agoIn China, yes, but not here.
- jajuuka 1y agoLabor is one of the most expensive parts of running a business. So just doing the math of, if we spend X amount of money on robots and can layoff Y amount of people then it's a net gain. Especially if a single machine can replace multiple people.
- whatever1 1y agoAlso fixed equipment / robots do not ramp up when the demand increases. On the other hand you can always hire more People to sort more packages. You don’t even need a building, a tent would suffice. What these companies do is conceptually very simple. Basically sortation of items at different granularities and locations. Not comparable with manufacturing companies.
- vidarh 1y agoThe Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
- throw310822 1y agoIncredibile! Also, from the comments: "My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
- CamperBob2 1y agoMeanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars. One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
- dimator 1y agoThose peaky humans and their stupid quality of life needs!
- skywhopper 1y ago[flagged]
- littlestymaar 1y ago> One of these things can be fixe That's correct, the second one can get fixed with higher wages and benefits, like when Ford introduced the “$5 a day” (doubling market average).
- CamperBob2 1y agoYes, if you're going to pay humans to suffer the indignity of doing a robot's job, it makes sense to pay well.
- Closi 1y agoNot sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history! They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
- gjm11 1y agoThere was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-patent-row-against-autostore-uk-court-2023-03-30/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-settle-all-patent-litigation https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indicates that shortly after the UK judgement they settled on terms very favourable to Ocado.) This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
- omneity 1y ago> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship. Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
- Closi 1y agoOcado's first automated warehouse installation was also purchased from Autostore (before they built their own solution, and now market/sell it)
- Closi 1y agoAutoStore losing a patent dispute doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them. Just looking at the patent dispute ignores that the first automated Ocado distribution centre was actually purchased from AutoStore, who had been selling their robot-digging tote system since 1996. Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves. So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy. IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
- AIoverlord 1y agoI just watched a video of theirs and i have no clue at all if this is more efficient or not. Amazon uses a lot higher stacked spaces than Ocado does. Are there any real numbers you can reference than just stating that Ocados way is better?
- philipwhiuk 1y agoI didn't say it was better, I said it was easier to design robots that don't have to work in an environment originally designed for humans.
- mmmlinux 1y agoYeah but then you cant pretend like your going to hire a bunch of humans in the local poor area that you built the warehouse.
- beambot 1y agoSymbotic also has a fascinating solution.