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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

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

#91

Post by immibis »

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?

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

#92

Post by dec0dedab0de »

warrenmiller wrote: post #65
DrillShopper wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.

How do you get senior developers if you replace the junior developers?

By then the senior developers will be obsolete too

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

#93

Post by dullcrisp »

bluGill wrote: post #57
LoganDark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the article? "The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities."

Compare to a doctor who needs nearly a decade of special training. Or an engineer who needs a complex university training program. Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or…

What data? Just try it yourself and see.

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

#94

Post by immibis »

bayindirh wrote: post #26
conception wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human labor is shockingly cheap.

Actually it's pretty expensive in the long run. They want raises, are finicky about their health, have pesky habits like going home, having life partners and something silly called work/life balance. Also, they sometimes organize and become collective bodies under something called a union. In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive a…

If you have the misfortune to be in a developed country (not the USA) then yes. Worker without rights are evidently pretty cheap. They go home, but you can just get twice as many. Catastrophic self-organization happens on scales comparable to robot crashes, and you can just recycle the offending units and replace them with new ones.

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

#95

Post by righthand »

bayindirh wrote: post #26
conception wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human labor is shockingly cheap.

Actually it's pretty expensive in the long run. They want raises, are finicky about their health, have pesky habits like going home, having life partners and something silly called work/life balance. Also, they sometimes organize and become collective bodies under something called a union. In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive a…

These "what if we give everyone jobs they are interested" remarks are just bullshit. You're not going to give people more interesting jobs, the result will just be flooded job markets everywhere. Then more jobs will become automated and people will then flood to more sectors that aren't automated. What a stupid dream, let people have meaningless jobs if they want that.

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

#96

Post by Dylan16807 »

LoganDark wrote: post #45
bluGill wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you read the article? "The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities."

They're not paying for the fastest. If they get some by accident that's great, but otherwise they just want someone reasonably mobile that will be good enough after a week or two of practice.

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

#97

Post by Gracana »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #68
Gracana wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about 60k a year for the employer, I think? That probably doesn't even cover the BOM cost of this robot installation.

Robot lasts 6-7 years under typical duty cycles (per FANUC). Think how an EV is cheaper over its lifetime to operate vs a combustion vehicle, capex vs opex. Price of labor will continue to increase in the future due to structural demographics. And lets be real, Amazon warehouse jobs are not good jobs and terribly hard on the human body. No one yearns for the Amazon mines. These are jobs that should absolutely be auto…

Oh yeah I agree with what you're saying, and of course they're working on this because they think it makes sense to do so, I just figure it's still a tricky sell even to replace $20/h humans.

FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.

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

#98

Post by cusaitech »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #39
ta1243 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do robots rely on being ionized? I'd have thought a robot which wasn't ionized would work just fine

You're thinking of "Onionized", when their exploits are covered by one of the world's best publications.

Are you talking about the "Soviet Onion"?

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

#99

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

If Amazon had to load and unload entire warehouses as fast as possible, they wouldn't do this. The constraints they're operating under are completely different.

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

#100

Post by barbazoo »

havblue wrote: post #89
oxqbldpxo wrote: post #76

Is there a future where we stop buying so much garbage?

If we can promote right to repair a bit more, we could actually talk about this.

Consumerism can be avoided regardless of right to repair legislation. We just stop buying shit we don’t really need which is most of what people buy on Amazon I imagine.
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