Many companies, notably of course Amazon, are interested in robots to execute tasks in the warehouse.
In fact, Amazon last year opened one of what it calls fulfillment centers in Alabama that it says will deploy 10 times as many robots as its previous state-of-the-art FC designs. (See Amazon Way more than Doubles Down on Fulfillment Center Robotics.)
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While the interest is high, in a recent article in the New York Times, reporter Peter Eavis notes that “even though robots are starting to take over some repetitive and cumbersome jobs, there are still many tasks they are not good at, making it difficult to know when or if robots will be able to fully automate this industry.”
Eavis adds that there are many essential but often simple tasks in a warehouse or FC for which humans are still far superior.
A great example from Eavis; humans are able to easily reach into a container of many items and move some out the way to pick the item needed.
The article notes it is far from clear when that situation will change and robots can do such picking and related work cost competitively with humans – especially when dealing at the piece level, versus say case handling.
The article cited Amazon’s Sparrow robotic picking arms (Amazon likes to give its robots a name), which are used for “top-picking,” which means selecting items that are at or near the top of a container such as a carton or tote.
Eavis reports that Amazon says that Sparrow can successfully grab over 200 million items of different sizes and weights, but that it is not adept at what it calls “targeted picking” — rummaging around many items to get to the one needed for an order.
The article also says that many robots that look ready for prime time in a lab don’t pan out on the warehouse floor. Eavis quotes Sally Miller, global chief information officer at DHL Supply Chain, as saying there are “more [robots] that we have not adopted than ones that we have” – though it has 7000 across its network.
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 One type of warehouse robot DHL has had good luck with is one called Stretch from Boston Dynamics, a robotic arm which it uses to unload floor-loaded cartons from a trailer.
Miller tells the Times that Stretch can unload cartons at a rate about double that of a human.
What about job losses from the new warehouse robots? The article says many companies are looking to automate tasks that are repetitive, menial and or mundane – the jobs no one wants.
The problem, SCDigest notes: those attributes can be said to characterize the vast majority of warehouse jobs currently.
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