Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 298 posts

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#121

Post by usrusr »

bluGill wrote: post #37
usrusr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost . If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.

What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.

Skilled. Not pedigree-filtered and trained and certified into a scarcity that may or may not actually be natural. Chances are most doctors or lawyers or software engineers would perform rather sub-par picking and putting in a warehouse.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#122

Post by yurishimo »

tombert wrote: post #104
vidarh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.

I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations.

It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#123

Post by dialup_sounds »

mapt wrote: post #84

This seems insane. We're trying to teach Longshoreman's Tetris to machines, instead of using the system of standard containerization that almost completely replaced longshoremen, despite lower packing densities.

The containerization is at a higher level: the rack of yellow bins is a four-sided tower that is robotically driven in and out of tightly packed uniform rows.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#124

Post by CamperBob2 »

throw310822 wrote: post #35
vidarh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

Incredibile! Also, from the comments: "My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."

Meanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars.

One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#127

Post by CamperBob2 »

sschueller wrote: post #29
alsodumb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.

Humans are cheaper than robots too...

In China, yes, but not here.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#128

Post by mmmlinux »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #9

It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse. The later is a much easier problem.

Yeah but then you cant pretend like your going to hire a bunch of humans in the local poor area that you built the warehouse.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#129

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

RaSoJo wrote: post #54
vidarh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

Ocado did run into multiple fire issues due to these robots colliding with each other. In 2019 and 2021 [1] Wonder if the matter has been resolved. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57883332

I'm curious how Amazon handles fire in the midst of their Kiva pods. Do they have procedures for retasking an army of robots to clear a path for humans to get access?

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#130

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

immibis wrote: post #91
omneity wrote: post #2

Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear. The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28

This feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?

The Kiva warehouses deliver the pods to human pickers at fixed stations. The humans just have to retrieve the product from the indicated bin without roaming the warehouse. The storage area for the pods is kept maximally packed without any aisles since the robots have their grid to operate in underneath.
Post reply on HN