Hacker News Reader

Comment by arsalanb | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it places great trust in the structural integrity of the packaging/box. BD claims it can "grab and move" boxes up to 23 kgs.

I've done some work in Mech Engg. designing grippers for smaller objects, and gripping objects is often the hardest part. From an operations research perspective, a human will figure out the best way to carry a box that is almost falling apart almost intuitively.

I can see this being extremely useful in, say, a large warehouse where it is isolated to finding and moving boxes to loading bays, particularly through an API.

Amazon is already doing this, and this video is highly relevant here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sEVX4mPuto

View on HN

There's something to be said for building the entire warehouse to support automation, versus trying to build a robot that can work in any warehouse.

True but there is massive long tail of warehouses in operations where this is not possible right now so I can see this working.

Does anyone know the cost?

The problem is that building the entire warehouse to support automation from day 1 requires a lot of upfront costs that only the largest orgs can reasonably afford. And it's remarkably easy to screw up, such that the automation doesn't end up being all that effective or itself introduces inefficiencies. It ain't like software, either, where it's (comparatively) easy to refactor things; if you fuck up an automation project, it's gonna be stuck that way for years.

Besides, in my experience (as a professional in this exact field of warehouse / supply chain / fulfillment operations), the biggest gains are usually process-related, and adding robots doesn't really help. The average warehouse tends to have ridiculously inefficient processes, driven by clunky and cumbersome software. Things like aisle zoning / pick path planning (i.e. minimizing the distances pickers have to travel for average pick orders, and minimizing contention between pickers and replen), data entry automation (e.g. barcode scanners and computerized scales instead of manual data entry), precise and measured use of conveyors, etc. help maximize the return on every labor dollar spent. These things can all be done incrementally to good effect.

That is, to your point: throwing robots at an inefficient warehouse just gets you an inefficient warehouse full of robots. And yes, designing the warehouse from the ground up to support automation as efficiently as possible is a good idea, but focusing on human efficiency will get you 90% of the way there - and then you can spend the other 90% of that effort on whiz-bang software and droids ;)

The clerks at the warehouse I worked at spent 30 min-1 hour every day hand-collating order manifests because whatever system that spit them out (from some contractor or corporate?) did so as PDFs that couldn't be easily modified. Literally building packets that were similarly structured, every night, by hand.

I did what I could with Excel macros to automate as much as I could, but I'm not a trained coder and I definitely didn't have security access to implement the tools that could have saved us huge headaches. I wondered quite a bit who the hell up top got paid to set up this process.

Yep, sounds like a classic case of an ERP or order management system throwing documents over the wall because "well all the data's there, so the warehouse can figure it out". And as for "who got paid", probably some COBOL programmer who retired decades ago and is now living the dream entirely offline in a beach house in Costa Rica.

Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.

PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded.

I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format.

There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it.

My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.

Well, now you have to pay for building the warehouse, and hope that the tech it's built around doesn't become outmoded before the upfront costs are made back + profit.

What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway? So it falls apart further down the stream?

This is similar to a situation we often deal in electronics repair business. Some people are very adamant about being careful when reworking around water damaged components because those solder joints/balls/legs are already weakened, when in fact the proper procedure is to rip out and replace everything compromised. Whats the point of turning device back to working electrical order while leaving it mechanically deteriorated - it will come back broken the first time used bumps into something, or when the eaten away solder ball finally gives up after few more heat cycles.

Any time someone would say "be careful or it falls apart" its time to remove/replace it, not pass along hoping to make it someone elses problem.

> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?

I'd imagine the goal ("purpose") is to meet a sweet spot between money spent on packaging materials and cost of returns from broken deliveries caused by the packaging.

Sometimes less money spent on packaging also aligns with corporate environmental goals. If you're into loyal customers you probably want to spend a little more than you "have to" one packaging.

I'd say if Amazon adopts this kind of robot for their warehouses they won't worry about investing a bit more into reliable packaging. It's still going to be cheaper than paying a monthly salary.

> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?

UPS sometimes breaks boxes they deliver. They just re-tape it and finish delivery. Sometimes everything is there, sometimes something is lost and you need to file a claim.

This robot at least needs to recognize broken box and hail human in such case.

Two of the oddest UPS statuses I have received were (I might be paraphrasing a bit):

"Package destroyed, contents discarded." (it was a piece of furniture with a glass component).

and

"Package delayed due to train derailment."

Much like running a large storage array and dealing with cosmic ray bit-flips and dead drives I wonder how many truck crashes, forklift incidents and train derailments UPS deals with on a given day. I bet their ticket queue is interesting.

Can you imagine triaging a train derailment and not setting it to the highest priority?

"Civil unrest".

Interesting. The only damaged deliveries I’ve ever received happened when someone sent me something fragile via Canada Post. It seems that when it arrived at the post office, they carefully took the broken box and all the leaked-out bits, put the whole assemblage into another, larger box, printed a new shipping label for the larger box, and shipped it on. So I received a clean, sturdy outer box, containing some detritus and a redundantly-labelled inner box, in turn containing the rest of my shipment. (I assume, if something in the inner box had been a liquid and leaked out through the box, they’d have put the whole inner box in a plastic bag before putting that in a box.)

Making that the general approach would probably solve the automation problem pretty cleanly. You could even have broken-package-packaging robots at each cargo-unloading step!

AngelSoft toilet paper comes in big cardboard case packs that have a diagonal perforation so that the top half-ish can be torn off and the case set on a self as a sort of display. No one does that with AngelSoft because the boxes are ugly but you see it with other things.

The problem here is that the perforations will easily tear under the weight of a full case so it's extremely common for it to give out if you try to pick it up by the top.

but who cares if the case makes it to the store in one piece because we only care about the packs inside.

Agreed re: loading, but it's still important to be able to carry that disintegrating box to a pack station to be repacked. Usually you can't do that on the spot, since having a box strewn about on the warehouse floor is a pretty big safety hazard.

> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?

Sometimes you're unloading or on the receiving end of disintegrating boxes, and you need to unload the container the freight came in. This is to receive in the damaged product to your warehouse before you can claim it.

Two examples I from bring on the receiving end: - ocean freight were water gets in through holes / damaged parts of the container that cause all the packaging material to breakdown - beverages being punctured or otherwise leaking causing all packaging material to be damaged

In an ideal state, you don't have damaged packaging because you can use clamps, slips, or other specially designed conveyance equipment.

Wow, I have vastly underestimated Amazon's technological lead. I worked in a non-Amazon warehouse many moons ago, and they weren't doing anything even in the same atmosphere as this.

Kiva bots are cool and have some advantages but I wouldn't say they're that much more advanced than other AS/RSes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_storage_and_retrieva...

For warehouses willing to make capital investments automating the process of getting bins to pickers is a pretty well understood problem. Getting boxes out of trucks like Boston Dynamics is doing here and getting items out of bins and into boxes like we[1] are doing are the frontiers of warehouse automation right now.

[1] http://www.righthandrobotics.com/

The number of robots and their speed are really impressive. But the concept is not so new. I saw robots driving around with parts at a car manufacturer in 1991 or 1992.

I think it is not that bleeding edge a thing.

Flipkart (India's Amazon, acquired by Walmart since then) deployed similar things in their warehouse: https://inc42.com/buzz/flipkart-deploys-100-automated-robots...

Yet another warehouse robotics startup from India: https://www.greyorange.com/

yikes , i can imagine it would be hard working in that 'sub' level in the building with only those florescent lights, having robots 'dump' their packages down a shoot onto you. maybe workers only stay there for 6-18 months before moving on to other areas of building (or new job)

Stay strong factory workers!

They're both indoors. There isn't natural light in the robot section either. What's the difference? It'd be about the same as being in any big box store other than it sound like like someone roller skating up above.

Amazon bought out a company with an nearly ready product.

But at this point they aren't the only company making that style of inventory/robot system now. There are a few clones out there in use.

In the comments on that video, there are Amazon workers saying most of this stuff is still manual. I've read some workers on reddit saying it varies a lot from warehouse to warehouse.

Not to mention some boxes might not work with griping. That was my first reaction when I saw it. I have also yet to see any robot that is designed for -20C / -4F warehouse which are in dying need of automation. Current form are at best per rack or per pallet automation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com