How many robots does it take to run a grocery store? [video]
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Also interesting to see the robot arm being used to move the products that currently come in boxes (suitable for humans to unpack) if robots become the norm will we see them being distributed like electronic components on reels/tape that are easier to unpack mechanically
https://www.google.com/search?q=reels+of+electronic+componen...
The other interesting tidbit was that the vast majority of the world was farm land. Humans lived in huge cities with tons of verticality. This was because there were too many humans on Earth - a whopping 9 Billion.
It seems like old science fiction authors regularly set the time of their worlds much closer to now than reasonable for some reason. To be more relatable perhaps? Blade Runner was set in 2019 for example: fully synthetic humans, flying cars, wars in space. None of that happened. Then there's 1984 by Orwell, and I'm sure dozens of other examples if you looked. Still waiting for that hoverboard (Back to the Future 2 was set in 2015).
This link[1] suggests that historical yields of corn were ~2 tonnes/hectare in the 1940s vs ~10 tonnes/hectare today.
Individual components != assembled product
The warehouse system in the video is basically a copy of AutoStore.
If true, yikes, but at the same time I have doubts if some aspects of the technology are even patentable (or at least make the claims too narrow to the point that patent-free variations allow workarounds and make the patents useless).
AutoStore alleges Ocado is infringing on the following five patents: 10,093,525[2], 10,294,025[3], 10,474,140[4], 10,494,239[5], and 10,696,478[6].
[1] https://www.therobotreport.com/autostore-sues-ocado-over-as-...
[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10093525
[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10294025
[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10474140
Expect a big drop in fulfillment center workers when Amazon gets bin picking that works.
Thinking from first principles helps. First, simplify the problem domain. The challenges are generally oddball shapes (think: heavy golf club), heavy items, speed, spatial efficiency, specialist handling requirements, environment, reliability, mobility and cost. If you have unlimited patience (retries allowed, no hard speed requirement) and less limited space (more power, better viewing angles, opportunity for stereoscopic vision), roughly similar form factor SKUs (=CPG), a purpose-built environment and no special handling requirements (nuclear waste/fresh food/fast-melting ice cream), no mobility requirement or cost sensitivity, then it's much easier.
Second, simplify handling by batching items in standard containers. What these system vendors never show you is how much they overcharge you for plastic boxes and how much energy is wasted loading, unloading and cleaning them.
Third, a grid-based system is clearly the most spatially efficient, so design around that.
In these systems the true spatial efficiency for most items is probably poor as Dematic Autostore for instance only offer 3 bin sizes. The true spatio-temporal efficiency is probably middling except when considered in parallel for huge order throughput requirements and a large number of SKUs because an untrained primate can pick faster than a bot for arbitrary items in most cases. Capex is very high, so these systems only make sense if you have a guaranteed large-SKU picking problem that won't go away, and you don't care about owning the knowledge to implement it cost-efficiently (eg. you are a manager looking out for #1 instead of the company's long term bottom line).
These things are terrible for the world, however, as they basically enable the accelerated consumption of single use plastics which is the CPG industry as a whole. I predict that in progressive countries such systems will be taxed or outlawed within our lifetimes, probably first in Europe, probably first in Holland as they are so good with agriculture and logistics.
I remember reading through the documentation and case studies and realizing just how advanced the tech was / is.
Pile it high, mountain, carve it out, water and eventually sea. It was pretty amazing as it was all projected into the sand in real time and looked just amazing.
Think it was running on some 1080 or 1080-Ti when that was king of graphics cards.
Maybe this is common and my experience is at issue, but I found the grid design with the "workers" on top to be really interesting.
My most direct experience was with a tape robot. This wasn't a run-of-the-mill backup library for a small DC, but a huge room on half of a floor of the datacenter that had a 6 axis[0] "bigger than an average adult man" one-arm robot that is usually seen in an automotive factory. It moved on a track the length of the room, grabbed tapes from a library and inserted it into drives; all of which were attached to a mainframe.
This was done with so few sensors, that the tape robot couldn't tell if it successfully grabbed a tape or missed it; indication of failure wasn't realized until the drive reported no tape present when the operation completed.
When it missed, the tape often ended up in the track where it was, sometimes, destroyed or could cause other forms of major malfunction.
Dealing with products of varying sizes, sensors to detect the successful retrieval of a product seem like they'd be necessary no matter how things are setup, but by designing it with the robots on top, a failed grab, at worst, results in the product remaining somewhere near where it is, or in the wrong bin -- but not stuck in the way of the track.
Coupled with sensors to detect "when the product was 'lost'" or where the product was failed to be retrieved from, the system could attempt to "retry the operation", avoiding operational shut-down/having to rely on the skill of operational staff to identify a failure condition early enough to prevent problems.[1]
[0] I think, not positive
[1] There's a study out there regarding factory automation that appeared shortly after Elon Musk gave up on "fully automated production" that talks about how bad people are at responding to "rare conditions" in an automated factory, resulting in costs that often outweigh the benefits of removing people from the process -- this sort of design appears to try to address some of the major things.
Apparently someone was hospitalized shortly after it was installed. And like all things, it was replaced a year later by a much more compact device that stored somewhere on the order of 100 times the data about a year after I started.
If you're interested in seeing what it looks like, I put it at 1:04, since that's where the 3D rendered exterior view starts. They can be extended and ours was much longer than that one in the video if memory serves (one end to the other of a complete DC floor diagonally; it forced a really odd layout for the original mainframe, cabinets, and then ultimately the tape library that replaced it).
Link: https://youtu.be/GwMn7YpF8r8?t=64
Without the playback position: https://youtu.be/GwMn7YpF8r8
I couldn't find the original paper that I read, but found an article with a myriad of links that explains the situation better (and will likely lead to a lot more) at https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-r...
I used to be an Ocado customer for about 9 years or so and they were very, very reliable in terms of deliveries and order fulfillment (I rarely ever got substitutes) - I'm wondering if this tech and other things in the warehouse played a huge role in making sure inventory/supply always met demand.
When doing a similar online shop with ASDA we get substitutes/missing items/unavailable items every week, and the vans are always late.
Anyway I was thinking, why not just have a long row (can go vertical as well) of product dispensers where all orders just go under? I mean they'd pass thousands of dispensing stations, but the output would be really consistent. And there'd be shortcuts here and there. I probably have baggage handling in mind.
You still have to load the dispensers.
I am currently working in a warehouse with 80k unique items, i am planning to automate the system (because currently it's using little to none automation, mainly because there is a conflict of interest) and a system of bins with the pickers/refilles zooming on the top is the best solution I've found so far.
I think that i will make the project open hardware/software.
Spent mags get put into an empty trailer and sent back to the factory.
Loose bag items are trickier, but if you put those in reusable plastic totes, and put those in the mags, and automatically eject them into another mag, I think it would work well with the existing suction arm ones.
Were regular Ocado users and its been a life saver during the pandemic - but - we have noticed that we keep ordering the same produce each week, the amount of new items is minimal compared to when we used to go into the store. Yes they suggest things but the suggestions (for us) have been poor whereas in store we would tend to try more new things. This may just be us and the algo works better for others but I think it should there is still much room for improvement in recommendation algos and there is a discovery challenge with online vs offline for groceries.
And if humans aren't walking the aisles, will we see a change in product packaging to focus on shipping and picking/packing efficiencies rather than shelf appeal?
Another thing I hated about many European supermarkets were the one-way gates at the entrance (like subway turnstiles) and the only exists through the registers. Walmart started doing similar during Covid but at least you could exit through self-checkout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer)
Still going - but an increasing % of their sales are online.
Major retailers here have click-and-collect but I don't think it was common 8 years ago. A big hardware store like Bunnings only started selling online in 2018, I think.
I’d be curious to see something similar in Amazon’s warehouse.
Here you are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nKPC-WmLjU
I'm guessing the difference is that grocery stores handle 20-50,000 different SKUs while Amazon has to handle 100,000s+.
I imagine they set some sort of exclusion zone around the broken robot, then drive out in the large platform and pick it up.
I kind of wish this would turn into a giant robot wars for a few days of the year, maybe you can buy a ticket to control one of them for the day, if only it weren't such a waste ^^'
https://youtu.be/LyQpY6UWs2E http://cdn26.us1.fansshare.com/photo/psychopass/sybil-system...
Also trucks are often dropping off a few pallets and not unloading entirely. The warehouse crew talk with the driver, sign way bills, and other things.
Yes these things could be solved but not by one company or quickly.
Maybe someone like Amazon will try something like that.
Although 5 hours is quite a bit longer than what I expected. Although for next day delivery it shouldn't be much of a problem.
AFAIK Amazon warehouse are still hand picked by human with item moving assisted by underlying Robert?
This is a fascinating field I am wondering if there are any similar technology for heavy, frozen products. For US that will be something like Sysco?
I thought the opposite - even in a warehouse that huge, there are items where they only keep five hours worth of stock? To me that seems incredibly lean.
Of course, that probably only applies to really short life products, like packaged sushi.
So the minimum time from arrival to dispatch couldn't be less than the length of the queue?
Always good to have an underlying Robert instead.
My immediate guess is that it adds a significant overhead to the products, but I really don't know.
The issue here is that the human needs the same amount of energy no matter what he's tasked with. Ideally robots will mean humans will be spending their time on fewer menial tasks, but the environmental impact of a living human is the same no matter if they're stocking shelves or doing any other job.
Robots might be able to give some environmental improvements in the workplace though. The areas they inhabit don't need to be well lit or heated/cooled for human comfort, but that's only true for places and times where humans can be removed entirely. Even in a fully automated warehouse the moment a repair person comes in, or a janitor, or a exterminator, or any human employee you have to accommodate their safety and comfort.
I suspect the additional efficiency of machines will just make it faster and easier for people to consume irresponsibility produced and packaged goods
I often wonder about how to make these kinds of comparisons, but it always involves so many guesstimates that it quickly falls apart.
So I think it's better.
It also leads to a lot more centralization, but that's a different discussion, of course.
A human at work is hardly environmentally neutral.
A human only works about 8hrs a day. Also our food is much less efficient to produce than electricity.
So if this robot is less than ~600 watts average, and as productive as a human, it’s a win.
Id imagine it’s well under 600.
…though I assume you’re asking specifically about the quasi-autonomous movement of the tote-bots? There is no one single “algorithm” to represent or model their movement, it’s a complex control system.
If two grocery carts crash into each other it's not the end of the world. In contrast, if you're writing a distributed database system and you corrupt data then that can be very serious.
It's quite simple to make sure (using e.g. bumpers) that if a robot crashes into the platform then nobody gets hurt.
Of course a towrobot would be better, but it's not really necessary and it also might get stuck.
Optimization of the robot movement across the grid might be done in various ways with different tradeoffs, but in general the study of algorithms for multi-stage planning is also a subfield of AI.
Either way, GrumpyNl asks a fair question. Some parts, sure: machine learning aka "AI" for working with this vision system is probably a lot quicker than manually figuring out rules for recognizing items. But the amount of emphasis they place on it, that this is all run by one big AI? It sounds to me more like they mean "AI" in the same way that 90s games said "CPU" or "AI" or "Computer" player, when it had nothing to do with machine learning.
I actually wanted to make a point against reducing social interactions in everyday life, especially with people outside of our bubble.
But well, I don't really see a way out, that wouldn't be completely illusive at this point, like, valuing well being of humans and nature over productivity gains and because-we-can in technology. That doesn't justify worsen the situation though.
As for me, I try to go only shopping in independent and ecological grocery shops, because of the products and because of the more welcoming atmosphere. Working there is not so bad, it's actually quite nice mostly (I can tell from experience).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocado_Group#History
Where do store employees get paid $3/hour? Minimum wage in UK (where that warehouse is) is $9-12/hour depending on age.
No way? That's an overstatement. What if the real estate is a lot cheaper because it's well outside the city in an industrial zone?
And what if this operation is large and efficient enough to service a population x10 the size of a similarly sized supermarket with just a handful of technicians (and an army of delivery people...).