High Efficiency And Low Cost, Retail Giants Embrace Robots With Passion

A decade ago, US e-commerce giant Amazon began using robots in its huge fulfillment warehouses in fulfillment centers, the institutions that track the production of orders in warehouses after users place them. In these robot-enabled warehouses, Amazon employees no longer have to shuttle back and forth between rows of shelves, and the robots will bring the goods directly to the pickers. The advantage of this is that it not only saves a lot of labor, but also improves the efficiency of picking, killing two birds with one stone. Today, Amazon deploys more than 350,000 robots of all kinds worldwide. Even then, it's not entirely sure that Amazon's huge demand for robots will be met.

The British "Economist" magazine believes that thanks to the continuous progress of warehouse robot technology, coupled with the increase in labor costs and recruitment difficulties, the logistics industry has begun to undergo some changes. Especially in the past two years, due to the prevention and control of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the global supply chain has been in a state of tension, and the business volume of consumers who are locked at home asking merchants for home delivery should continue. Therefore, the performance of major e-commerce companies should continue. Single centers will always be running at full capacity, and demand for robots will rise.

Warehouse automation is no longer the icing on the cake

However, despite the heavy use of robots, many companies still need to hire temporary workers during the peak business season to cope with the increase in business volume. In the run-up to the holiday shopping season last December, Amazon added about 150,000 workers in the U.S. alone and paid handsomely—seasonal temporary workers can earn an average starting salary of $18 an hour and $3,000 in salaries. Signing bonuses and, in some locations, an additional $3 an hour for temporary workers based on shifts.

If you look at the time axis, almost all of Amazon's recruitment positions are calculated in units of 10,000. In March 2020, Amazon announced it was hiring 100,000 workers, 75,000 in April and 100,000 in September. Throughout 2020, Amazon has hired more than 500,000 employees. These recruited employees are mainly responsible for Amazon's warehouse and express delivery business.

The long-term impact of high reliance on increasingly scarce labor on logistics and distribution is clear: "Warehouse automation is no longer just icing on the cake, but a necessity for sustainable development," according to a new study by McKinsey & Company. This means that the logistics industry will need more robots, including replacing those already in use with newer, more efficient ones, as well as replacing most of the jobs that are still done by humans with advanced robots. Therefore, McKinsey predicts that the warehouse automation market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 23%, and the size of the warehouse automation market will exceed $50 billion by 2030.

The continuous growth of market demand has driven the continuous iteration of technology. Today, a new generation of robots with more functions is emerging to provide better services for the logistics industry. According to the British "Economist" magazine, the "600 series" robot developed by Ocado, the largest online grocery retailer in the UK, is one of the representatives. The robot "changed everything," said Ocado CEO Tim Steiner.

The "600 Series" robots are much lighter than the "500 Series" robots currently used by Ocado, are more flexible and require less battery power. Ocado's robots work in a giant network of metal cabinets in the fulfillment center. Some fulfillment centers are bigger than a football field. Each cell of the metal cabinet holds plastic crates containing goods, which can be stacked up to 21 layers high. Once an order is received, a robot is dispatched to pick a crate and deliver it to a sorting station. There, an employee takes out the required items, scans them one by one and puts them into the appropriate bags. This is similar to what you would do at a supermarket checkout.

Before picking robots, it could take an hour or so to manually pick items around the warehouse if it was a large order. But now, with multiple robots working in a metal cabinet at the same time, picking is much faster.

Ocado's new "600 Series" robots will be equal to or better than the "500 Series" in performance, but consume less energy. The "600 Series" has the added benefit of making fulfillment centers smaller. This means fulfillment centers can be installed in weeks rather than months or longer, and their installation costs are lower.

Several retail giants are starting to use robots

The British "Economist" magazine revealed that Amazon is also developing more efficient robots. Its earliest robot, called Kiva, was a slender robot that slid under a human-height shelf that held goods, then lifted the shelf and delivered it to a sorting station. In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems, a U.S. warehouse robotics company, for $775 million, then renamed it Amazon Robotics.

Amazon Robotics has since developed a range of robots, including a scaled-down version of Kiva's Pegasus, which allows Amazon to stock more items in fulfillment centers and is making extensive use of robots in smaller urban fulfillment stations. In preparation for a more automated future, the company recently opened a new robotics manufacturing facility in Massachusetts to increase output.

In 2014, after it was determined that the Kiva robots would be made exclusively for Amazon, two engineers from a medical company decided to start a company called Exotec to start building a different type of robotic warehouse. The French company has developed a three-dimensional system using a robot called Skypod. The Skypod looks a bit like the Kiva and can also move around freely in the warehouse. But instead of moving shelves, the Skypod can climb onto them. When it has climbed to the desired height, it takes a crate, then climbs down the rack with the crate and sends the crate to the sorting station. The Skypod maximizes warehouse space as it can climb up to 12-meter-high shelves. Since the system is modular in design, it can be easily expanded. Skypod can not only return crates to the shelf, but also transfer them where they need to be reloaded.

Some retailers are already using Skypod, including French hypermarket group Carrefour, American clothing company Gap and Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo.

More robots will enter the field of production and life

Of course, because the robots move too fast (the Skypod's speed is 4 m/s) and have the potential to injure people, they are often designated to operate in enclosed areas. Right now, Amazon employees don special safety vests if they need to enter a robotic work area. The safety vests contain electronics that signal to nearby robots that someone is there. After receiving the signal, the robot will stop working, or take another route.

In addition, for robots to work with humans, they must be equipped with additional safety systems such as cameras, radar and other sensors to avoid bumping into humans. Therefore, they tend to move cautiously and slowly, which causes the robot to pause frequently and work slower. Now, robots that are more powerful and more aware of their surroundings are on the way. For example, the Nippon Electric Company (NEC) has begun to employ "risk-sensitive stochastic control techniques" similar to procedures used in finance to avoid high-risk investments. In a warehousing scenario, it allows robots to weigh risks before starting work, such as choosing the safest and fastest route through the warehouse. During testing, the technology doubled the robot's average picking speed without compromising safety, NEC said.

The British "Economist" magazine said in a related report that the most difficult task for fulfillment centers to automate is sorting and packaging, so it needs to increase manpower during peak seasons. And it's not easy to do these jobs with robots, because fulfillment centers stock a myriad of different types of merchandise, all of varying shapes, sizes and weights. Still, Amazon, Ocado and numerous companies have begun to automate sorting by installing robotic arms at some sorting stations. These robotic arms typically identify items by using cameras and reading barcodes. Artificial intelligence is being used to teach robots how to handle certain commodities, such as not putting potatoes on top of eggs.

Ocado is also developing a robotic arm that bypasses sorting stations and picks up items directly from fulfillment center crates. Fetch Robotics, a Silicon Valley-based logistics robot maker that has developed a robotic arm that can move at will in fulfillment centers, was acquired by U.S. auto-signing company Zebra Technologies last year.

Another Massachusetts-based robot maker, Boston Dynamics, has launched a heavy-duty mobile robot called Stretch that helps drivers unload and place boxes in designated locations. In January, U.S. logistics giant DHL placed its first Stretch order to use the robot in its North American warehouses over the next three years.

It is foreseeable that in the future, many different types of robots will enter different fields of production and life, but at the same time, they will also bring many different types of jobs to humans.

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