Fully Autonomous Robots: The Warehouse Workers of the Near Future

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The article is on page B1 of today's The Wall Street Journal. as "A Grocery Baron and His Robots."

The robots move about within a huge cage designed to keep humans away.

Some OSHA standards and consensus standards:

Robotics Standards

Fully Autonomous Robots: The Warehouse Workers of the Near Future

Grocery baron Rick Cohen is pitching bots that can pick and stack goods untethered, promising to cut inefficiency

By Robbie Whelan

[e-mail]

Sept. 20, 2016 10:50 a.m. ET

265 COMMENTS

WILMINGTON, Mass.—When Target Corp. decided to revamp one of its biggest California distribution centers, it had a choice. It could build a new warehouse, it could install established technologies for picking products off shelves or it could take a risk on a new breed of robots from a reclusive billionaire. ... Target went with the billionaire’s bots.

Target’s new automatons are from Symbotic LLC, part of a grocery empire run by New England billionaire Rick Cohen. Mr. Cohen, through his own national distribution network, and deals with some of the nation’s biggest retailers, aims to show that robots can overturn the business of storing, handling and hauling the cases of goods that retailers truck to their stores by the millions each year.

His sales pitch to grocery chains and retailers, including Target, Coca-Cola Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is simple: Symbotic’s automation system includes autonomous robots that can travel untethered among storage racks in a distribution center. They can move up and down aisles to stack and retrieve cases. They coordinate with more-conventional robots that perform simpler tasks. ... That is in contrast to many other warehouse-automation systems, in which the robots tend to be bolted down or limited to fixed routes or tracks and are less flexible in what they can do.

“What we’re doing with autonomous bots is not that dissimilar from what Google is doing with autonomous cars,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview at Symbotic’s Wilmington headquarters. “I think within five years, it’ll change distribution.”



A Symbotic autonomous robot, resembling a small driverless go-cart, travels on ledges down a storage-rack aisle to pick out products in a C&S Wholesale grocery-distribution center in Newburgh, N.Y. Photo: Michael Rubenstein for The Wall Street Journal

....



Packages move along conveyors into a large metal storage enclosure Symbotic engineers call ‘The Box,’ in which the autonomous bots will travel to pick out products for packing onto pallets. Photo: Michael Rubenstein for The Wall Street Journal

[Xipe Totec]

1. So, how many cheeseburgers will those autonomous robots consume?

Or, closer to the mark, how many Target specials will they buy?

The problem with eliminating labor from the equation is that it also eliminates consumers from the equation.

[Sherman A1]

2. Precisely

It does indeed remove consumers from the equation, however I think the Genie is out of the bottle.

[Wellstone ruled]

3. Neet!!

Carrier Refrigeration in Richfield,Minnesota has been using a system like this since about 1992. What is really cool is,the ability of the Robots to preform the restock functions.

[OnlinePoker]

4. Saw something similar in Germany in 1992

I got to tour a ball bearing plant that supplied the German auto industry with about 30% of all the bearings used. Their entire shipping and receiving department was 3 people per shift. The only thing they did was verify the manifests, put on production codes for incoming items, and punching the data into the computers. Everything else, including boxing for final shipment was done by robots.

[clarkkentvotes]

5. GAI - guaranteed annual income - inevitable and welcome

This is why I think eventually we will inevitably want/need a guaranteed annual income - and I think it will be for the best -

I wrote an article on it a while back :

https://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2016/06/guaranteed-annual-income-idea-whose-time-has-come-update-faq-added-end

[OrwellwasRight]

6. I just don't view such a thing as ever happening

in this "free market," "rugged individualist," hating-the-poor for sport country we live in. And if any money ever was given, it would be a starvation level, time limited amount because anything more than that would "foster dependence." A desperately poor population favors the already powerful corporations. They like us this way as desperation make us more compliant in their view.