
Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses  - prakash
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots.html
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ivankirigin
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.

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sho
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>

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noonespecial
I think this scenario is highly unlikely because society will not allow robots
to make mistakes. A robot pilot might fly perfectly 99.999% of the time. 100
times better than human pilots but the first time a robot plane crashes,
people will go nuts and adopt a "ban them all" mentality. With a human pilot,
they just shrug and say "pilot error". People make mistakes. Robots aren't
allowed to.

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yters
I think this is due to a sense of control and fear of the unknown. People
shrug it off because they think they could conceivably do better, or have
helped the situation. But, the higher the barrier to entry the less accepting
people are of error. Look at the discrepancy between about of airline deaths
and car deaths, and the respective fear it engenders in people. Just about
everyone knows about driving a car, but very few know what it is like to fly a
plane.

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elecengin
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!

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

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mojonixon
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
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.

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gravitycop
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._

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jmatt
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!

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

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

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andreyf
_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?

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brk
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.

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queensnake
... but seriously, I heard they use(d) Segways; that was their level of
automation for a while (maybe still).

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pchristensen
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
Really? Or, more, make room for more no-jobs.

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pchristensen
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).

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

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devicenull
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

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robotron
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
> 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> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite>

Also, here's my first law : "Anything that can be automatized WILL be
automatized, whatever the costs."

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rw
> 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.

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Raphael
It does hold, because humans aren't as specialized as a robot designed
specifically for the job.

~~~
gravitycop
_It does hold, because humans aren't as specialized as a robot_

That humans are not as specialized as specialized robots was not contested.
What about the "whatever the costs" part?

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

