Amazon warehouses depend on [...]]]>
Amazon warehouses depend on the little orange robots to bring racks of merchandise to human pickers who pack the boxes with the customers’ orders.
The contest used to be called the Amazon Picking Challenge, but the big management brains may have thought it was time for a classier name. I see the earlier Url for the event, AmazonPickingChallenge.org has been transformed into AmazonRobotics.com.
“Picking” is the term for pulling items from the warehouse inventory to be packed into boxes for customers’ orders. But as the video below shows, packing may be the harder challenge. The robot sucks up objects well enough and then drops them into a large box, with no attempt to use space efficiently. Amazon may have to order a lot of extra large boxes if this sort of machine is adopted.
I’ve blogged about this competition over the last three years and can report no stunning breakthroughs. For example, the robots in the video following aren’t able to pick up the objects on every try:
Below is the winner, from Australia, Robot Vision’s Cartman, that does the basic grab-and-drop pretty well, but no human pickers need to be worried about their jobs just yet.
The upshot is the amazing dexterity of the human hand coupled with our brains is very hard to recreate in a machine. However, the machines are going gangbusters in many other areas of work, from farms to factories, so the fact remains that America should seriously reduce the number of immigrant workers imported by the government. We have plenty of them already.
]]>Amazon’s New Robo-Picker Champion Is Proudly Inhuman, MIT Technology Review, July 31, 2017
It only needs to see seven images of a new object before it can reliably spot and grab it.
A robot that owes rather a lot to an annoying arcade game has captured victory in Amazon’s annual Robotics Challenge.
E-commerce companies like Amazon and Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer, currently boast some of the most heavily automated warehouses in the world. But items for customers’ orders aren’t picked by robots, because machines cannot yet reliably grasp a wide range of different objects.
That’s why Amazon gathers together researchers each year to test out machines that pick and stow objects. It’s a tough job, but one that could ultimately help the company to fully automate its warehouses. This year the task was made even harder than usual: teams had only 30 minutes for their robots to familiarize themselves with the objects before trying to pick them out of a jumble of items. That, says Amazon, is supposed to better simulate warehouse conditions, where new stock is arriving all the time and pallets may not be neatly organized.
The winner, a robot called Cartman, was built by the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. Unlike many competitors, which used robot arms to carry out the tasks, Cartman is distinctly inhuman, with its grippers moving in 3-D along straight lines like an arcade claw crane. But it works far, far better. According to Anton Milan, one of Cartman’s creators, the device’s computer-vision systems were crucial to the victory. “One feature of our system was that it worked off a very small amount of hand annotated training data,” he explained to TechAU. “We only needed just seven images of each unseen item for us to be able to detect them.”
That kind of fast learning is a huge area of research for machine learning experts. Last year, DeepMind showed off a so-called “one-shot” learning system, that can identify objects in a image after having only seen them once before. But the need to identify objects that are obscured by other items and pick them up means that Cartman needs a little more data than that.
(Read more: TechAU, “Robot, Get the Fork Out of My Sink,” “Machines Can Now Recognize Something After Seeing It Once,” “Inside Amazon”)
The Tally robot scoots around stores to check inventory and verify prices.
The robot won’t actually be restocking the shelves because that task requires the dexterity of the human hand — for now at least. But developers are engaged in a race to build a machine that can move objects around as well as a person. Ground zero for that technology is the Amazon Robotics Challenge, an annual contest for a robot that can physically pack an order into a box for shipment (which is taking place this week, as it happens). A machine that can pick and pack like a human hand will have a lot of job-killing applications beyond the Amazon warehouse.
The Tally robot is a creation of Simbe Robotics in San Francisco. The company has a pleasantly reassuring video with a Strauss waltz playing — though there’s no mention of the jobs lost since a human with a clipboard is no longer needed.
The retail business is about to be transformed by automation, including the shopping experience for consumers, and the result will be severe job loss. Hardest-hit will be cashiers, because self-checkout is a simple technology. In May, the financial services firm Cornerstone Capital Group forecast that between 6 million to 7.5 million retail jobs are at risk of being automated over the next 10 years. What are those people supposed to do for a living when the same technological forces are knocking many other unskilled jobs? President Trump’s efforts at increasing jobs are having an effect, but the long term looks unpromising.
Eric Brynjolfsson, tech author from MIT, recently remarked about the revolution in retail (Amazon’s Move Signals End of Line for Many Cashiers, NYTimes, June 17, 2017):
“Amazon didn’t go put a robot into the bookstores and help you check out books faster. It completely reinvented bookstores. The idea of a cashier won’t be so much automated as just made irrelevant — you’ll just tell your Echo what you need, or perhaps it will anticipate what you need, and stuff will get delivered to you.”
The shopping experience that tech wizards are designing sounds pretty sterile, but it would be an improvement over sales helpers who don’t speak English well (as I reflected yesterday while shopping for manila folders at Staples).
The future will automated. To prepare for it, the least Washington could do is severely limit immigration, say by about 99 percent, because AUTOMATION MAKES IMMIGRATION OBSOLETE.
]]>The robot invasion has begun in the grocery aisle, New York Post, July 27, 2017
A family-owned grocery chain in the Midwest is set to test an aisle-roving robot, joining technology-savvy retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart.
The robot, named Tally, will begin scanning store aisles at three St. Louis-area Schnucks grocery stores in a six-week pilot program starting on Monday. The robot will check aisles three times a day to look for out-of-stock items and make sure items and price tags properly correspond, company officials say.
“We’re excited to see what this partnership brings,” Dave Steck, the chain’s vice president of IT and infrastructure, said in a statement on its collaboration with San Francisco-based Simbe Robotics. “This is just one of many ways that Schnucks is staying at the forefront of technology to enhance our customers’ shopping experiences.”
Schnucks — which operates more than 100 stores in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa — will initially use the adjustable 38-inch, 30-pound robot to monitor items on store shelves but is hopeful that the robot “may open up a world of other possibilities” with the data it collects, Steck said.
The robots are the first test of the technology in Missouri and could expand to other Schnucks locations, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
Simbe CEO Brad Bogolea told the newspaper that the robot’s ability to find items that need to be restocked and pricing errors allows employees to focus on other tasks. The robot has already been scanning aisles in other stores across the country, including some Target stores in San Francisco last year.
“The goal of Tally is to create more of a feedback mechanism,” Bogolea told the newspaper. “Although most retailers have good supply chain intelligence, and point-of-sale data on what they’ve sold, what’s challenging for retailers is understanding the true state of merchandise on shelves. Everyone sees value in higher quality, more frequent information across the entire value chain.”
Steck, meanwhile, said the robot isn’t being tested to one day replace human employees.
“This is not to displace jobs,” he told the Post-Dispatch. “It still takes someone to order [merchandise], receive it from the warehouse and ultimately to stock it. There are no arms or legs on this robot.”
Amazon, which announced last month it will acquire Whole Foods, is planning to slash cashier jobs as part of an overall strategy to automate jobs and cut prices, Bloomberg reported. An Amazon spokesman denied that job cuts were planned at Whole Foods.
A source told The Post in February that Amazon planned to “utilize technology to minimize labor” at new, automated supermarkets that could operate with as few as three employees.
Walmart, meanwhile, has also filed a patent to use drones in its stores, which would allow the flying robots to “carry the item of inventory to a delivery area” located within the store, according to a patent application.
One of the bumps along [...]]]>
One of the bumps along the road for roboticists is the amazing human hand, which allows Amazon’s pickers to pack boxes to be shipped to customers. Interestingly, Amazon has scheduled another picking challenge, where robot technology teams will compete for a big cash prize and a possible deal with the company.
Below, Amazon’s orange Kiva robots scoot under appropriate racks of merchandise to bring the ordered items to a human picker who packs the boxes for shipping.
Below are details about Amazon’s Robotics Challenge which will take place July 27-30 in Japan. The search is for a machine that “can recognize objects, grab them, execute tasks, detect errors and recover as needed” which sounds a lot like the picker job. Clearly Amazon’s goal is to find a machine that can at least partially replace the company’s human pickers.
With robotics technology advancing so rapidly, it seems unwise for the US government to continue importing immigrant workers. They will soon be unneeded, if they aren’t already.
]]>Amazon is offering $250,000 to a team that comes up with an advanced robot for its warehouses, CNBC, May 10, 2017
Amazon is offering $250,000 to teams who invent robots that could potentially work in their massive fulfillment centers, and it has chosen 16 finalists for a tournament it is organizing later this year, the company said on Wednesday.
The e-commerce giant is running its third annual Robotics Challenge this year in July in Japan and has picked finalists from across the world. There are competitors from major U.S. institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon University.
Participants will need to show that their robot software and hardware can recognize objects, grab them, execute tasks, detect errors and recover as needed. The robots will be scored by how many items are successfully picked and stowed in a fixed amount of time, Amazon said.
The Seattle-based firm has been working on making the whole process from placing an order to delivery more efficient as it looks to cut down the time a person has to wait for a package. One major part of the process is choosing and packing items in a fulfillment center.
Amazon currently has more than 80,000 automated robots in its warehouses globally. The robots currently use wheeled systems which carry and transport products around a fulfillment center. But it is now looking for more advanced mechanisms.
“Commercially viable automated picking in unstructured environments still remains a difficult challenge,” an explanation on the Amazon Robotics website reads.
This refers to a robot being able to roam a warehouse where items may not be in an order that can be easily decoded by software. While the current wheeled robots are limited, Amazon is hoping its robotics challenge could uncover a system to take their warehouses to the next level.
Amazon bought a company in 2012 called Kiva which created these wheeled robots for warehouses. In 2015, Kiva’s name was officially changed to Amazon Robotics. Under this brand, Amazon is attempting to create next generation robots.
Its fulfillment centers are just one part of the puzzle when it comes to fast deliveries for Amazon. The company is also testing deliveries by drone, for example, to speed up deliveries.
Now we see one of the new warehouse robots, and the inVia model is capable of picking an item off a shelf and plunking it into a box for eventual shipment.
Plus the report says the machine will end those “tedious” jobs that humans suffer with to get their paychecks.
In fact, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics listed the 2015 number of stock clerks and order fillers at 60,670. This is how jobs are disappearing — a few at a time as a warehouse operator rents some robots to increase efficiency, cut costs and work 24 hours.
The “tedious” job of warehouse order filler is decent-paying for low-skilled employment, around $30,000. It’s the kind of job an immigrant might take.
So maybe America doesn’t need so many immigrants…
]]>Warehouse Robots Might Just Make Tedious Jobs a Thing of the Past, Digital Trends, August 19, 2016
Ask anyone you know that’s worked in a warehouse. While the pay is decent for a job that requires little training in many cases, the work is extremely tedious. But with our ever increasing reliance on technology, it was only a matter of time before humans were taken out of the equation.
That’s where a Los Angeles-based inVia Robotics hopes it will make its mark. The company this week unveiled what it calls the first “goods-to-box” robotics solution, one that requires no human intervention at all. Robots do all the sorting, “picking,” and even packaging for shipment.
The first time a package might reach human hands is in shipment, a far cry from the human-dominated system we have now. That’s pretty crazy.
InVia says it already has customers using its system. The addition of its robots doesn’t always mean unemployment for workers. One company uses the InVia system beside its warehouse workers, to not only deal with labor shortages, but to allow it to ship faster than it ever has before.
It’s also scaleable, as each robot is leased rather than sold. This means a warehouse owner could ramp up its robotic fleet of workers around the holidays to meet the demands of its business, and reduce its fleet during down times to save on costs.
The warehouse isn’t the only place that is soon going to go robotic. Retailers such as Amazon and Walmart are looking to drones as a way to skip the postal service and deliver directly to you. Soon, yours could viably be the first human hands to touch what you’ve just bought online.
“Drones have a lot of potential to further connect our vast network of stores, distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and transportation fleet,” Walmart has said of its own plans.