Next Leap for Robots: Picking Out and Boxing Your Online Order
Next Leap for Robots: Picking Out and Boxing Your Online
Order
Developers close in on systems to move products off
shelves and into boxes, as retailers aim to automate labor-intensive process
Facing more pressure to speed orders more quickly to
customers, a rising number of companies are using high-tech robots in their
manufacturing process. But could it render humans obsolete? The WSJ takes a
look inside.
By Brian Baskin July 23, 2017 7:00 a.m. ET
Robot developers say they are close to a
breakthrough—getting a machine to pick up a toy and put it in a box.
It is a simple task for a child, but for retailers it has
been a big hurdle to automating one of the most labor-intensive aspects of
e-commerce: grabbing items off shelves and packing them for shipping.
Several companies, including Saks Fifth Avenue owner
Hudson’s Bay Co. and Chinese online-retail giant JD.com Inc., have recently
begun testing robotic “pickers” in their distribution centers. Some robotics
companies say their machines can move gadgets, toys and consumer products 50%
faster than human workers.
Retailers and logistics companies are counting on the new
advances to help them keep pace with explosive growth in online sales and
pressure to ship faster. U.S. e-commerce revenues hit $390 billion last year,
nearly twice as much as in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales are
rising even faster in China, India and other developing countries.
That is propelling a global hiring spree to find people
to process those orders. U.S. warehouses added 262,000 jobs over the past five
years, with nearly 950,000 people working in the sector, according to the Labor
Department. Labor shortages are becoming more common, particularly during the
holiday rush, and wages are climbing.
Picking is the biggest labor cost in most e-commerce distribution
centers, and among the least automated. Swapping in robots could cut the labor
cost of fulfilling online orders by a fifth, said Marc Wulfraat, president of
consulting firm MWPVL International Inc.
“When you’re talking about hundreds of millions of units,
those numbers can be very significant,” he said. “It’s going to be a
significant edge for whoever gets there first.”
Until recently, robots had to be trained to identify and
grab each item, which is impractical in a distribution center that might stock
an ever-changing array of millions of products.
Automation companies such as Kuka, Dematic Corp. and
Honeywell International Inc. unit Intelligrated, as well as startups like
RightHand Robotics Inc. and IAM Robotics LLC are working on automating picking.
In RightHand Robotics’ Somerville, Mass., test facility,
mechanical arms hunt around the clock through bins containing packages of baby
wipes, jars of peanut butter and other products. Each attempt—successful or
not—feeds into a database. The bigger that data set, the faster and more
reliably the machines can pick, said Yaro Tenzer, the startup’s co-founder.
Hudson’s Bay is testing RightHand’s robots in a
distribution center in Scarborough, Ontario.
“This thing could run 24 hours a day,” said Erik
Caldwell, the retailer’s senior vice president of supply chain and digital
operations, at a conference in May. “They don’t get sick; they don’t smoke.”
JD.com is developing its own picking robots, which it
started testing in a Shanghai distribution center in April. The company hopes
to open a fully automated warehouse there by the end of next year, said Hui
Cheng, head of JD.com’s robotics-research center in Silicon Valley.
Swisslog, a subsidiary of Kuka, sells picking robots that
can be integrated into the company’s other warehouse automation systems or
purchased separately. The company sold its first unit in the U.S., to a large
retailer, earlier this year, said A.K. Schultz, Swisslog’s vice president for
retail and e-commerce. Mr. Schultz declined to name the retailer.
Previous waves of warehouse automation didn’t lead to
sudden mass layoffs, partly because order volumes have been growing so fast.
And automated picking is still at least a year away from commercial use,
robotics experts say. The main challenge lies in creating the enormous
databases of 3D-rendered objects that robots need to determine the best way to
grip new objects.
Some companies hope to speed development by making some
research public. Amazon.com Inc. will hold its third annual automated picking
competition at a robotics conference in Japan later this month. For the first
time, entrants won’t know in advance all the items the robots will need to
pick.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a team is
simulating millions of attempts to pick 10,000 objects. Funded by Amazon,
Siemens AG and others, the project is meant to build an open-source database
for use in any automation system, said Ken Goldberg, the professor leading the
project.
“With 10,000 objects, I’m surprised how well it did,” he
said. “I would love to show it 100,000 examples and see how well it performs
after that.”
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