How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race
bloomberg.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O0UKARdLDc (360° video)
http://www.tu.no/artikler/unik-video-bli-med-inn-i-kompletts...
The packages still need to be packaged by hand though, but it seems like it would be easier to automate that for the AutoStore system since each product has its own box as opposed to Amazons Kiva system where multiple products are placed on the same shelf.
What about maintenance on a column? You have to stop the whole system, unload & disassemble part of the grid just to run a new cable or check for humidity or whatever on your structural columns.
That's the only downside I see. It's a very simple concept solving a very real issue and their motto "stop airhousing start warehousing" real hits home!
as for maintenance I would think a few strategic extra rows could serve that purpose without losing too much efficiency.
most the picking I am used to has both voice and light based picking with high velocity parts duplicated to the front.
For maintenance, there is an extra area outside the grid where you can move the robot out of the grid to do some maintenance work on it without affecting the rest of the system.
It does seem to emphasize efficient use of land area, though, and in the case of modern warehouses in North America, at least, I imagine the real estate itself is effectively cheaper than ever (because modern warehouses are built so big and so far away from everything, and because tax incentives often reward new construction) and only getting cheaper. It seems like an odd variable to optimize.
If real estate were at a premium, wouldn't we expect to see traditional warehouses, distribution centers, data centers etc in a multi-story format? But as far as I know, we don't. Instead, owners opt for giant footprints on cheap land.
The great thing about Kiva robots is that they're quite simple and robust mechanically. They're a battery, motors, wheels, and a lift mechanism. They're completely interchangeable, and having one fail isn't a big deal. Maintenance is replacing batteries, motors, wheels, and maybe the electronics module as necessary. The infrastructure they require is modest. The competing systems all seem to require more elaborate robots, special totes, and special shelf construction.
Amazon says that Kiva robots cut their order picking time from 90 minutes to 15. Other retailers, seeing that number, must be terrified. It's a technological improvement like that which makes same-day delivery from a large inventory possible.
A company gaining a huge advantage by getting a total monopoly over another market, which they can enforce due to having patents.
That’s not what patents were supposed to create, and what Antitrust regulations were supposed to prevent.
If this is the future, it’s quite a dystopia: Monopolies everywhere.
Sure, I get that the Silicon Valley business model is to destroy regulation, get a monopoly (ideally in a new market niche, but destroying existing competition with illegal predatory pricing is also common), and then to abuse the monopoly, but is no one thinking that for the average consumer a free, competitive market might be better?
To be honest Amazon buying Kiva is probably the best thing that could happen. They broadcast to the world that such a company is worth almost a billion dollars. Now the market is filling with competitors and investment. That's exactly what you want.
Additionally, from the article it looks like patents were only one reason no one else is as good - it seems more like no one else had tried to build anything like them.
Also, Amazon is generally seen as good for consumers - they force down prices like no one else. They might not be that great for warehouse employees though.
And for the suppliers, it’s also problematic.
That’s why usually the solution is a free market.
Most monopolies can only be sustained through state intervention, which is why large government is more of a problem than large companies like Amazon.
This situation is fantastic for the consumer - companies competing to lower prices and increase service.
As the story says the market has responded quickly and the industry is growing, precisely how things are supposed to work.
You're confusing monopolies coopting government to maintain control with large government causing and maintaining monopolies.
Can you provide one single example of this having happened? I'm willing to believe it, I just haven't found one. Typical examples provided fall short of that claim.
"In 1904, Standard controlled 91 percent of production and 85 percent of final sales." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil
"Due to competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up"
And finally, this little tidbit: "The dissolution had actually propelled Rockefeller's personal wealth." Hurray for the Sherman Act..?
Large governments cause monopolies to happen. You said the same thing. Business co-opting a government to creat a monopoly is only possible when the large government exists. You could argue that water and dirt don't cause trees to grow, but without either there is no tree. The language definition is immaterial.
Increases in government size can only occur by taking over parts of the economy into state monopolies. The ultimate large government is a totalitarian communist government, which has a monopoly on everything.
The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
Microsoft's market position is inseparable from its support by government in the form of software patents. When their rent on Android phones is larger than their income from their own phones, and that rent is purely based on having a patent on an obsolete filesystem which is only useful because it was previously "the standard" (ie., imposed by them), the government is directly helping Microsoft take advantage from their dominant market position in other markets - exactly what they purpose to ban.
(Not a fan of patents, but that wasn't the problem back then).
Meanwhile, the government lawsuit not only did nothing to curb their position (IE kept rising at the same rate), as it gave Microsoft "a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other 'platform software' under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition."[1]
That would be the libertarian fantasy, but no, unfortunately that is entirely incorrect.
The "regulations" that you assume make monopolies possible is really unrestricted capitalism in itself, which leads to accumulation of capital in the hands of one or few, often colluding entities.
Capitalism favors larger operations over smaller ones through efficiencies of scale. There is no human-created regulations that do this.
In fact it is quite the opposite of what you're imagining.
That’s why I usually consider government monopolies as better than for profit companies, as better than private monopolies.
(Considering the correlation between government monopolies being usually regulated better).
Sadly, in the past decades, we haven’t seen those in many places anymore.
The UK has mismanaged the NHS for many years, and is now considering to privatize it into a private monopoly.
Look at Comcast, TWC, etc, who have regional monopolies, and how well they work.
And considering how easy politicians are to bribe, I am not sure we can get properly regulated monopolies at all anymore.
Until we can ensure the proper regulation, we might want to prevent monopolies from even occuring.
Despite Kiva's simplicity, the warehouse has to be designed completely for robotic use, whereas these robots navigate around existing human accessible shelves. If Kiva is railway trains, these guys are automated cars: designed for the existing world.
A Kiva warehouse is just a big space with a flat floor. It's not like the old Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, with their custom tracks, conveyors, and towers.[1][2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It7qr6fga3c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuvrP1QKsdk
I'm also aware that invia hasn't shipped yet, that's why I said "could be interesting"
I think the Kiva robots are an important part of Amazon's fulfillment efficiency but I don't see a huge market for that technology across the warehousing industry because there are a lot of other problems that it doesn't solve at all or doesn't handle very well.
From my point of view the automated storage and retrieval and shuttle systems are much more interesting and more widely applicable. They are also a much more efficient use of vertical space.
If you have a Kiva-type goods to person robot system and your order profile changes like more lines per order or more order lines of a particular SKU, the system can run into scaling issues. There are only so many robots and so much floor space to navigate in. Shuttles to some extent have the same problem but because of their smaller footprint you run out of horizontal space slower than you do with Kiva robots.
Adding more shelving units is limited by floor space. The equivalent scaling for shuttles is adding more aisles. Adding more aisles scales farther than adding more shelving units because it uses the entire vertical height of the building. Even taking mezzanines into account aisles are going to scale farther.
Adding more robots or shuttles will scale until the travel paths are congested. Whichever technology moves faster is going to scale better here. I don't know enough about the speed of the Kiva robots vs shuttles to say who is better here but I suspect shuttles can move faster.
Adding more pack stations is something either type of system can do and I can't see any advantage either system has over the other there. Kiva is probably more flexible here because you don't need expensive conveyor reconfiguration/addition if you want to add more pack stations. Shuttles, with the proper supporting conveyor can probably get higher throughput.
I think where Kiva really shines is in its flexibility. It can store a lot of different types of items and it is flexible in its ability to move stuff around. It is definitely not the most labor efficient goods-to-person automation technology and it is also not a great use of space. It runs into problems if you need to scale up in SKUs per order or overall order lines per day because you don't have enough travel space available to get all that stuff to the pack stations. Based on my ordering habits and what I have seen of friends Amazon is dealing with a very low number of SKUs per order so it works for them.
Just wish I'd started a warehouse robot company 4 years ago :-)
For specifics I'd refer to the CMU Masters courseload or the WPI undergrad:
The article reminded me of acquisitions in the Gilded Age. Perhaps one could compare Bezos to Rockefeller, presuming Bezos was the one who pushed for such purchases.
On the other hand, there's going to be short term turmoil as people scramble to find new jobs in an increasingly automated world.
Really?
Do you mean: "Being paid to do soul-crushing work is better than not being paid" ?
Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ?
The first is an issue of income and the distribution of product (in the GDP sense of product). There is no axiomatic rule that says "you have to have a job to get paid", it's just how our current economy operates.
If I owned a farm that produced a variety of food in excess of the needs of my whole family, but was totally operated by self-maintaining robots, would I need to have a job? The robots would produce all the food I need, and I could sell the excess in order to obtain other goods.
I guess I could say my job was "farmer" or "grocery salesman" or "robot supervisor", but I wouldn't actually being doing work.
If I am a truck driver, and I own my own truck and I make an income by transporting goods, and then I convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then (if we temporarily ignore external price pressures) I still make the same income as I used to. But I'm just reaping the benefits of my self driving truck, I don't actually "work" anymore (or at least to nowhere near the extent I used to).
But if I am a truck driver, and someone else owns the truck and I make an income by being contracted to transport goods, and then they convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then I no longer make any income, and I'm screwed. The owner of the truck reaps incredible benefits, and I don't actually "work" anymore, but I also don't have an income.
That's how things work in our society, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's no universal moral law that says that the first ex-truck-driver should continue to be paid for doing nothing much, but the second ex-truck-driver needs to get off his butt and go find a new soul-crushing job so that he can earn an income.
As our economies change to produce more output with fewer workers, there becomes less useful work for the citizens to do, even though GDP is increasing. That ought to be a good thing (economically) - more "stuff we want", less effort to produce it. But it won't actually being a good thing for the general population unless we move to a different model for the distribution of income, so that there's a way for the populace to share in the increased productivity even though their manual labour is no longer needed.
That where ideas like "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) come in.
Are we sure this isn't true? Are people who don't have to work (e.g. those on permanent disability in the US) more or less happy than comparable people in dead-end soulless jobs?
I don't know of any studies, but I suspect there would be some.
In addition to the question of "how do we share income in a less-work world?", there is the question "how do we ensure that the are opportunities for everyone to contribute something meaningful to society?"
Ideally those questions would connect - we would use our increased product(ivity) to fund a wider range of human endeavours that might not have been considered "economically productive" in previous generations.
I don't know what that looks like, but I would hope it means more art and science, rather than more soul crushing, meaningless busy-work.
Maybe not many, but I feel pretty confident that number is greater than 0.
One of the hopes of UBI is that when everyone receives a salary just from being alive, and working earns you extra on top of that, whether one works become more of a choice (like living frugally) instead of a failure, and loneliness is reduced when unemployment isn't an evil to combat, and more people choose to do something else.
Apparently nail painting businesses are a viable industry, in my eyes they are totally useless.
Most of the businesses we recognise today would have been hilarious to our ancestors. Paying good money for a personal trainer? Paying someone to wash your car?
This is an age-old problem which keeps solving itself.
But jobs existing are a consequence of two things: (1) demand & (2) ability to price work output above a minimum.
UBI answers a world where there aren't enough of (2) to satisfy labor supply (whether through automation or increases in efficiency). Because bar repealing minimum wage statutes we're going to reach a point where for {minimum wage salary} there only exist X potential jobs (additional jobs not economically-feasibly offering a sufficient income), and labor pool > X.
Most people don't like their work. Most people don't like waking up on someone else's schedule and do work that their told to do. That's why businesses pay them, after all.
Companies will only pay what they have to.
Some examples of industries where tons of people work for shit money (less than a person of their abilities could earn in other industries) or even sometimes for free because of an emotional attachment to that industry are showbusiness, art and academia.
Then you have the opposite examples, like working on an oil platform - most of those people would earn less money if they had picked a different industry, because they have to be paid more to agree to live on an oil platform and do a shitty and dangerous job.
If 50% of the jobs in a field are automated, in the near term you still have 100% of the former labor looking for that job, pushing salaries down towards their minimum, thereby reducing the cost effectiveness of further automation.
To me, minimum wage says "if you work, then you should at least able to support yourself on your income$." UBI+ says "if you work, you must find greater fulfillment than mere sustenance in your work."
Personally, I can't see minimum wage applying to anyone receiving UBI. Although it might make sense to have a "less than minimum wage" tax that helps fund the UBI directly.
$ Abstracting away actual amounts and whether or not they're enough
+ Market adjustments aside
The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation.
That's a very romantic view of weaving which hides the real reason there are still many weavers, mostly in low-cost countries: They are cheaper than machines. There is no guarantee that this will still be true in face of increasing computing capabilities and machines which learn better than before.
Yes, mostly in Asia, living in hellish conditions, often struggling to get enough food. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with that comment.
Depends how short the "short term turmoil" is. If its 20+ years then it could blight an entire generation.
It's always been this way.
Besides the population of most countries is starting on the path to decline.
I thought I read somewhere that new warehouses were not using the Kiva systems.
Probably smaller warehouses are not purpose built for Kiva so maybe they don't have power, floor space, or layout to make kiva work well. This one in Manhattan is only 40k feet and has low ceilings: http://time.com/4159144/amazon-prime-warehouse-new-york-city...
According to the article Amazon now have 30k Kiva robots and that in all of the US there are about 200k more warehouse workers since 2007.