9 ms·

Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses

80 points by prakash 18y ago

gravitycop 18y ago
The meat: the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, [...] locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour. [...] Any worker (sometimes called "pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out. "Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse," Wurman said. [...] As the robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the warehouse for greater efficiency. [...] "We find that it's two to four times more efficient [than the average warehouse]," said Wurman. [...] they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that's stuck onto the floor of the warehouse. That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working around the people, cruising around in the dark.
patrickg-zill 18y ago
First we had "lights out" datacenters, now we have "lights out" warehouses.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
  We've had "lights out" manufacturing centers for decades now. There's a lot more automation out there than most people realize.
dmix 18y ago
Demo of the robots: http://www.kivasystems.com/demo/index.html http://www.kivasystems.com/demo/index.html
ivankirigin 18y ago
Interestingly, these robots aren't that smart. It just goes to show how much you can build by engineering a whole system, and not expecting a single robot to be that intelligent. For example, the vision system is essentially built with fiducials (markers like QR codes) on the trays. These robots could do nothing in your basement. I'm not saying this is bad - it's actually awesome to see more real robotics companies selling products. My point is that I really look forward to robots that can perceive their environment better and manipulate objects in it with dexterity. That will really knock your socks off.
- sho 18y ago
  Amen. Proper computer vision would revolutionise .. well, an awful lot of things. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like Manna, though .. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
  - ivankirigin 18y ago
    Marshall Brain has some interesting ideas, and I actually agree that there might be some disruption from lots of jobs getting roboticized. That said, Manna is completely implausible. He takes some trends in political correctness, like banning smoking, to a ridiculous distopian degree of somehow justifying prison for almost every human because they can't find jobs. I don't think there is an upper bound on the number of people working in creative fields. It is a question of how fast the people can move to them.
    - sho 18y ago
      Well, I agree, but I don't think he meant Manna to be taken as a realistic story - more like a hypothetical exploration of extreme best-case and worst-case scenarios. I found it pretty interesting and certainly thought-provoking. I'd need a defintion of what a "creative field" is before I agreed with you on the second paragraph, but definitely concur with the general point - people will adapt, new industries will spring up. The robotic revolution might be more jarring than most but yes, we'll survive, and personally I can't wait.
robotron 18y ago
We've been wanting to do this where I'm at for a while. While I hate to put human beings out of work, they really do make too many mistakes for shipping things perfectly.
- ovi256 18y ago
  > While I hate to put human beings out of work That's understandable, but think that these people will probably find more fulfilling and productive jobs. As long as the layoffs are gradual, they will have time to retrain and find other jobs. Of course, if their skillsets are really obsolete and many are laid off at once, this can lead to structural unemployment. Eastern European countries went through that after the fall of communism. The transition was not pretty. But smaller layoffs and career changes are just the cost of technical progress. Have a look at the Industrial revolution [1] and Luddites [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Also, here's my first law : "Anything that can be automatized WILL be automatized, whatever the costs."
  - ewiethoff 18y ago
    No, their debts will spiral and their ability to get any sort of loan for "retraining" will plummet, if they're in the U.S., that is. American households average something like $10,000 credit card debt these days. Unemployment compensation pays 2/3 or 3/4 what they had been earning. Hence their bills pile up and, with bad credit, they can't get "retraining." They're hosed.
  - rw 18y ago
    > Also, here's my first law : "Anything that can be automatized WILL be automatized, whatever the costs." The point of automation is greater efficiency and efficacy, not some fetish with robots. Your "law" probably does not hold.
    - Raphael 18y ago
      It does hold, because humans aren't as specialized as a robot designed specifically for the job.
andr 18y ago
If you look 0:21 in the video (scroll down), the robot at the top looks like it's stuck searching for a waypoint.
- devicenull 18y ago
  Looking at the other videos, it would appear the robots spin in circles in order to lift up the racks.. so I'd suspect that's what's happening there
- paraschopra 18y ago
  I thought it was waving his hand to the camera
andreyf 18y ago
Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you I'm surprised Amazon isn't on that list... anyone care to hypothesize why?
- brk 18y ago
  Amazon is eating their own dogfood. They have been beta testing a product called "Actual Turk". With Actual Turk, people show up at a defined location and perform menial tasks for a few cents each. Any product you order from an Amazon warehouse has been picked and packed by an Actual Turk over the last 3 months. In between product pick/pack jobs Actual Turks also perform other jobs on demand, such as making hand-shadow puppets in front of a webcam, reading bedtime stories to children over the phone, or seeking out specimens to ship to a child for their school rock-collection project. This offering was also alpha-tested in front of many Home Depot locations in the Southwest.
  - queensnake 18y ago
    ... but seriously, I heard they use(d) Segways; that was their level of automation for a while (maybe still).
jmatt 18y ago
Between their demo and the youtube video in the wired article, Kiva couldn't ask for better PR. It really is an interesting system. No RF technology used as far as I could tell. Simple solutions combine to make an efficient reliable scalable system. I'd love to talk to the programmers that got to build this system, what fun!
pchristensen 18y ago
This is like Google for blue-collar workers. I love being able to think of something and have it appear magically, and this should let people that work with their hands do the same. Ironically, taking the time and cost out of finding parts should make more room for creativity in manufacturing and distribution jobs.
- queensnake 18y ago
  Really? Or, more, make room for more no-jobs.
  - pchristensen 18y ago
    My comment wasn't meant to apply to every business, but the most creative and enlightened ones would definitely take advantage of this and thrive (Zappos is a case in point).
mojonixon 18y ago
not new. I spent a couple weeks in a HallMark warehouse in the mid to late 90s. The actual warehouse was about 4 football fields with shelves about 60 feet high. Automatic pickers running on rails would go along the aisles and up the shelving to grab boxes, and deposit them on conveyors. The conveyors read the bar codes(they were talking about rfid at the time) and delivered them to the proper loading dock. No one was actually in the warehouse and they had to turn up the lights to give us a tour. All run off of two three crappy tower servers.
- Retric 18y ago
  I would like to point out that it is a novel solution because it uses what works well from a robot standpoint and what works well from a human one. The robots do the sorting, moving heavy things etc. The humans take the huge assortment of different items and package them. It also minimizes what changes you need to make to the warehouse so it should be a quick and cheep to retro fit. While some warehouses specialize others hold 100,000+ types of items that are not in boxes ready to ship. These items range in shapes and sizes and can be grouped to save on shipping costs etc. Think a Ford warehouse that holds every part ever made over the last 10 years or Amazon.com not Netflix. So yes, human costs are higher, but they should be (~15 seconds a box and 20$ / hour) > 15c a package which could be far less than the savings from grouping items. And the system should be far more fault tolerant than robots moving on fixed tracks that need to pickup a wide range of box sizes vs the same shelf system every time.
elecengin 18y ago
These guys are a local company out in Boston, and I know a few fellow students who have interned with them. The beauty of the system, as many people mentioned, lies in the simplicity of it. It has two uncommon traits for robotics - reliability and affordability. Another neat feature of the system that is not clearly shown is that when the shelf is brought to the employee to have the item picked, a laser pointer mounted at the human station points to the item on the shelf to be picked. Quite impressive!
pskomoroch 18y ago
My friend Tom is a python hacker and works there, I pointed out the thread... maybe he'll chime in.

80 points by prakash 18y ago

The meat: the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, [...] locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour. [...] Any worker (sometimes called "pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out. "Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse," Wurman said. [...] As the robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the warehouse for greater efficiency. [...] "We find that it's two to four times more efficient [than the average warehouse]," said Wurman. [...] they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that's stuck onto the floor of the warehouse. That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working around the people, cruising around in the dark.

patrickg-zill 18y ago

First we had "lights out" datacenters, now we have "lights out" warehouses.

HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
We've had "lights out" manufacturing centers for decades now. There's a lot more automation out there than most people realize.

dmix 18y ago

Demo of the robots: http://www.kivasystems.com/demo/index.html http://www.kivasystems.com/demo/index.html

ivankirigin 18y ago

Interestingly, these robots aren't that smart. It just goes to show how much you can build by engineering a whole system, and not expecting a single robot to be that intelligent. For example, the vision system is essentially built with fiducials (markers like QR codes) on the trays. These robots could do nothing in your basement. I'm not saying this is bad - it's actually awesome to see more real robotics companies selling products. My point is that I really look forward to robots that can perceive their environment better and manipulate objects in it with dexterity. That will really knock your socks off.

sho 18y ago
Amen. Proper computer vision would revolutionise .. well, an awful lot of things. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like Manna, though .. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- ivankirigin 18y ago
  Marshall Brain has some interesting ideas, and I actually agree that there might be some disruption from lots of jobs getting roboticized. That said, Manna is completely implausible. He takes some trends in political correctness, like banning smoking, to a ridiculous distopian degree of somehow justifying prison for almost every human because they can't find jobs. I don't think there is an upper bound on the number of people working in creative fields. It is a question of how fast the people can move to them.
  - sho 18y ago
    Well, I agree, but I don't think he meant Manna to be taken as a realistic story - more like a hypothetical exploration of extreme best-case and worst-case scenarios. I found it pretty interesting and certainly thought-provoking. I'd need a defintion of what a "creative field" is before I agreed with you on the second paragraph, but definitely concur with the general point - people will adapt, new industries will spring up. The robotic revolution might be more jarring than most but yes, we'll survive, and personally I can't wait.

robotron 18y ago

We've been wanting to do this where I'm at for a while. While I hate to put human beings out of work, they really do make too many mistakes for shipping things perfectly.

ovi256 18y ago
> While I hate to put human beings out of work That's understandable, but think that these people will probably find more fulfilling and productive jobs. As long as the layoffs are gradual, they will have time to retrain and find other jobs. Of course, if their skillsets are really obsolete and many are laid off at once, this can lead to structural unemployment. Eastern European countries went through that after the fall of communism. The transition was not pretty. But smaller layoffs and career changes are just the cost of technical progress. Have a look at the Industrial revolution [1] and Luddites [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Also, here's my first law : "Anything that can be automatized WILL be automatized, whatever the costs."
- ewiethoff 18y ago
  No, their debts will spiral and their ability to get any sort of loan for "retraining" will plummet, if they're in the U.S., that is. American households average something like $10,000 credit card debt these days. Unemployment compensation pays 2/3 or 3/4 what they had been earning. Hence their bills pile up and, with bad credit, they can't get "retraining." They're hosed.
- rw 18y ago
  > Also, here's my first law : "Anything that can be automatized WILL be automatized, whatever the costs." The point of automation is greater efficiency and efficacy, not some fetish with robots. Your "law" probably does not hold.
  - Raphael 18y ago
    It does hold, because humans aren't as specialized as a robot designed specifically for the job.

andr 18y ago

If you look 0:21 in the video (scroll down), the robot at the top looks like it's stuck searching for a waypoint.

devicenull 18y ago
Looking at the other videos, it would appear the robots spin in circles in order to lift up the racks.. so I'd suspect that's what's happening there
paraschopra 18y ago
I thought it was waving his hand to the camera

andreyf 18y ago

Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you I'm surprised Amazon isn't on that list... anyone care to hypothesize why?

brk 18y ago
Amazon is eating their own dogfood. They have been beta testing a product called "Actual Turk". With Actual Turk, people show up at a defined location and perform menial tasks for a few cents each. Any product you order from an Amazon warehouse has been picked and packed by an Actual Turk over the last 3 months. In between product pick/pack jobs Actual Turks also perform other jobs on demand, such as making hand-shadow puppets in front of a webcam, reading bedtime stories to children over the phone, or seeking out specimens to ship to a child for their school rock-collection project. This offering was also alpha-tested in front of many Home Depot locations in the Southwest.
- queensnake 18y ago
  ... but seriously, I heard they use(d) Segways; that was their level of automation for a while (maybe still).

jmatt 18y ago

Between their demo and the youtube video in the wired article, Kiva couldn't ask for better PR. It really is an interesting system. No RF technology used as far as I could tell. Simple solutions combine to make an efficient reliable scalable system. I'd love to talk to the programmers that got to build this system, what fun!

pchristensen 18y ago

This is like Google for blue-collar workers. I love being able to think of something and have it appear magically, and this should let people that work with their hands do the same. Ironically, taking the time and cost out of finding parts should make more room for creativity in manufacturing and distribution jobs.

queensnake 18y ago
Really? Or, more, make room for more no-jobs.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  My comment wasn't meant to apply to every business, but the most creative and enlightened ones would definitely take advantage of this and thrive (Zappos is a case in point).

mojonixon 18y ago

not new. I spent a couple weeks in a HallMark warehouse in the mid to late 90s. The actual warehouse was about 4 football fields with shelves about 60 feet high. Automatic pickers running on rails would go along the aisles and up the shelving to grab boxes, and deposit them on conveyors. The conveyors read the bar codes(they were talking about rfid at the time) and delivered them to the proper loading dock. No one was actually in the warehouse and they had to turn up the lights to give us a tour. All run off of two three crappy tower servers.

Retric 18y ago
I would like to point out that it is a novel solution because it uses what works well from a robot standpoint and what works well from a human one. The robots do the sorting, moving heavy things etc. The humans take the huge assortment of different items and package them. It also minimizes what changes you need to make to the warehouse so it should be a quick and cheep to retro fit. While some warehouses specialize others hold 100,000+ types of items that are not in boxes ready to ship. These items range in shapes and sizes and can be grouped to save on shipping costs etc. Think a Ford warehouse that holds every part ever made over the last 10 years or Amazon.com not Netflix. So yes, human costs are higher, but they should be (~15 seconds a box and 20$ / hour) > 15c a package which could be far less than the savings from grouping items. And the system should be far more fault tolerant than robots moving on fixed tracks that need to pickup a wide range of box sizes vs the same shelf system every time.

elecengin 18y ago

These guys are a local company out in Boston, and I know a few fellow students who have interned with them. The beauty of the system, as many people mentioned, lies in the simplicity of it. It has two uncommon traits for robotics - reliability and affordability. Another neat feature of the system that is not clearly shown is that when the shelf is brought to the employee to have the item picked, a laser pointer mounted at the human station points to the item on the shelf to be picked. Quite impressive!

pskomoroch 18y ago

My friend Tom is a python hacker and works there, I pointed out the thread... maybe he'll chime in.