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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
by 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 agoI 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.