The world's first humanless warehouse is run only by robots
The world's first humanless warehouse is run only by
robots and is a model for the future
·
Mujin, a start-up spun out of Tokyo University,
has developed robot controllers that can fully automate warehouses and fulfillment
centers.
·
Its customer, JD.com, has what it calls the
world's first fully automated e-commerce warehouse in China equipped with Mujin
robots.
·
The Japanese start-up wants to help automate
warehouses in the United States.
Guest Contributor | Tim Hornyak October 30, 2018 CNBC.com
At a recent technology show in Tokyo, a large robot arm
reached into a full-sized mockup of a shipping container and began unloading
boxes from it. Set on a platform that moved back and forth, the robot was doing
a job usually carried out by warehouse workers and forklift operators. The goal
of the company that's developing it, Mujin, is total automation.
The system, still a prototype, doesn't work perfectly —
it accidentally damaged a box during the demo — but it's going to be trialed in
warehouses in Japan this year.
"Lifting heavy boxes is probably the most
backbreaking task in warehouse logistics," said Mujin's American
co-founder and CTO, Rosen Diankov. "A lot of companies are looking for
truck unloading systems, and I believe we're the closest to commercialization."
The Tokyo-based start-up is aiming to be a leader in
automating logistics processes. To do that, it's building robot controllers and
camera systems and integrating them with existing industrial robot arms. The
key product here is the controllers — each about the size of a briefcase, one
for motion planning and one for vision — that act as an operating system that
can control the hardware from any robot manufacturer. If a goal such as
grasping an object is input, the controllers automatically can generate motions
for robots, eliminating the traditional need to "teach" robots
manually. The result, according to the company, is higher productivity for
users.
Simply put, the technology — based on motion planning and
computer vision — makes industrial robots capable of autonomous and intelligent
action.
Mujin turned heads when it showed off its transformation
of a warehouse operated by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com. The 40,000-sq-m
facility in Shanghai began full operations in June. It was equipped with 20
industrial robots that pick, transfer and pack packages using crates on
conveyor belts, as well as camera systems and Mujin robot controllers. Other
robots carted merchandise around to loading docks and trucks.
Amazon also has invested heavily in automating its
fulfillment centers, buying Mass.-based robot company Kiva Systems for $775
million in 2012, but JD.com called its facility the world's first fully
automated e-commerce warehouse. Instead of the usual 400 to 500 workers needed
to run a warehouse that size, it needs only five. And their job is only to
service the machines, not run operations.
Standardizing total automation
"My goal is to automate warehouses in America and
make a lot of success stories there," said Diankov. "But will people
value that, and are there enough people with expertise to do it? That's why we started
in Japan."
Mujin's plan is to move away from customization for every
client and standardize a complete automation package.
"Unfortunately, just having a robot system work
perfectly is not enough, and we need to have the equipment and system around
the robot to finally allow it to contribute to the operations of the
business," said Diankov. "Once there are enough solid standardized
components for warehouse automation, we can focus our energies to quickly
deploy and perfect them."
Born in Bulgaria, Diankov moved to the United States at
age 10 and studied robot engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he
earned a Ph.D. After stints at seminal California robotics start-up Willow
Garage and the University of Tokyo's JSK Robotics Lab, he founded Mujin in 2011
with CEO Issei Takino.
Staffed by about 70 people, including many non-Japanese,
the start-up is headquartered in a working class district on the eastern side
of Tokyo. While preaching the value of automation at trade shows, the company
reminds people that the number of workers in Japan is dropping by 2,125 per
day, due to the country's low birthrate and aging population.
"In the U.S., robot technology is often undervalued
and directly compared to the value of human workers," said Diankov.
"If you're going to be competing with that from day one, maybe you have no
room to grow quickly. In Japan they have a mindset that values robotics much
more, even if it sometimes doesn't make economic sense. They're willing to jump
into investments into robotics."
Diankov believes fears of robots taking jobs from people
don't reflect the reality of the workplace.
"Introducing robots creates more jobs, and history
has shown that's been the case," he said. "Companies that have
embraced automation, like Toyota — it's the biggest car company in the world
now."
No fuzzy logic
Mujin is building smart machines based on model-based
approaches to robotics. Unlike applications in the current fad for deep
learning, Mujin's controllers are not learning to accomplish a task through
trial and error. There's no guesswork involved. They're programmed to do a
specific task very well, and every position of every joint of a Mujin robot is
tracked, down to the millisecond. While that lowers the possibility for error,
it also imposes a massive computational burden on the controllers, so they're
equipped with fast microchips that can evaluate tens of thousands of possible
moves, choosing the best one in less than a second.
"The approach is like that of a train, plane or
rocket — you don't want it to be self-learning, just predictable when it goes
from A to B," said Diankov. "That's how you create innovation, with
perfectly predictable systems. That's what we're trying to do with robotics. I
like to call this machine intelligence, not artificial intelligence."
Rosen said Mujin is probably the only robotics start-up
doing this advanced robotics stuff that's not working at a loss. The company
has raised $7 million in VC funding from Tokyo venture capital firms JAFCO and
the University of Tokyo Edge Capital. It's also earning revenue from projects
for Japanese firms, such as Askul, which specializes in e-commerce for office
supplies, and Paltac, a logistics firm, as well as JD.com in China.
"In the U.S.,
robot technology is often undervalued and directly compared to the value of
human workers."
-Rosen Diankov,
co-founder and CTO, Mujin
Mujin also has managed to penetrate Japan's conservative
$1.4 billion robot manufacturing industry, dominated by global players like
Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric. It's persuaded robot makers to loosen their tight
grip on their confidential software so that Mujin controllers can directly run
robot servomotors. Now the start-up wants to scale as quickly as possible and
expand into the United States.
"End customers are choosing Mujin first before they
choose the robots," said Takino, who met Diankov when he was a salesman
with Iscar, an Israeli machine tool company owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
"We are robot controller makers, which is like Windows for industrial
robots. Windows was popular for the killer application it introduced — browsing
the internet. We want to make killer apps like bin picking as easy as
possible."
"We're at the cusp where all these different
automation technologies — including robot hardware, sensing hardware, AI
algorithms, conveyor systems and sorting systems — coming together," said
Diankov. "Five years ago it was not possible, because there were too many
unknowns. But today there's a solution for each of these different components
in the warehouse. And now it's a race to see which company puts all the
components together the fastest and has the end result. There are several
choices for each component, and the jury's still out on what a completely
automated warehouse will look like."
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