Steve Shaheen, CEO and founder, DTG.
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If you&#;ve ever visited an Amazon distribution center, you might think it&#;s like something out of Monster&#;s, Inc. Across 800,000 square feet of warehouse space, massive conveyer belts move products to different floors while robots move across the site, lifting and transporting pallets. Other bots carry shelves of products to workers, detecting, selecting and handling individual products in inventory as though in a trance-like state. Computer vision, a form of AI, also plays a role, helping staff know where every item is in the warehouse.
There&#;s a term being used to describe this autonomy of systems, and it&#;s called &#;the dark warehouse,&#; fully automated and autonomous sites, operating with minimal human intervention. The idea is that they will operate around the clock every day of the year, and no light will be required since robots don&#;t need it. It also refers to the fact that, unlike humans, these fully automated and autonomous warehouses can operate in cold or warm conditions, which reduces energy and heating costs.
All of this sounds attractive as warehouses grapple with worker shortages and rising operating costs, but how realistic is it? According to Matthew Johnson-Roberson, director of Carnegie Mellon University&#;s Robotics Institute, "there isn&#;t one single robot that&#;s so intelligent and so versatile that it&#;s like a human worker."
Amazon, the benchmark for e-commerce success, may be as close as a company can get to fulfilling the dream of a dark warehouse, yet it still requires humans to be in the loop, and may always require it. Today, AI and robots can only handle work that requires limited intelligence (paywall). They&#;re only as good as the data they&#;re trained on. This can be problematic today when a barcode may be torn or faded and unreadable, a product is missing from its typical location or a parcel is oddly shaped. Issues that interfere with standard processes or procedures require human logic. Someday, that level of human reasoning may be contained in intelligent systems through deep neural networks, or deep learning, but it seems quite a ways off.
Rather, robots will continue to work alongside workers. In a Bloomberg article (registration required), an Amazon exec was quoted saying, &#;In the 10 years since we&#;ve introduced robotics in our facilities, we&#;ve added hundreds of thousands of new jobs and created more than 700 new job categories that enable our technology. Amazon employees around the world work alongside robots and will continue to do so in the future, supporting safety in our workplace and helping us better deliver for our customers.&#;
Amazon currently stands heads and shoulders above any other retailer or e-commerce provider in automation, and it appears that they&#;ll have the lead for some time. It&#;s estimated that only 5% of warehouses are automated today, and given the cost, resources and disruption it can create, it could be difficult for smaller providers to make the investment, especially today amidst economic uncertainty.
According to a study conducted by Zebra Technologies, "61% of decision makers plan to enable partial automation or labor augmentation with technology in the warehouse; and three-quarters of respondents believe human interaction is part of their optimal operational balance, with 39% citing partial automation (some human involvement) and 34% citing augmentation (equipping workers with devices) as their preference."
Yet while warehouses understand that workers will continue to be essential to the success of automation, before striving for it, they have other steps they need to take. As CEO and founder of a company that works directly with warehouses and the logistics market, I can say that most have likely already taken the steps to leverage warehouse management systems (WMS) and other software to boost efficiency and productivity in the warehouse and across the supply chain, yet they&#;re accessing those solutions on fixed workstations that require workers to traverse the big and dangerous site to access them.
Warehouses and 3PLs need to first take a long hard look at their operations and find ways to boost efficiency, productivity and safety. Many will realize how motion waste occurs throughout each shift, as workers travel to not only fixed workstations, but also to printers, or charging stations to power their devices. While they&#;re well on their way to leveraging WMS and other software systems, the next step is mobilizing the devices they need to access them. Bringing devices, such as laptops, RFID readers, printers or handheld devices to the point of task accomplishes all of the three goals: efficiency, productivity and safety, while minimizing risk.
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There&#;s a lot of road to travel between traditional manual processes in the warehouse to autonomous, robot-driven distribution centers and 3PLs, and most companies are at the beginning of the journey. Yet once the journey toward fully autonomous warehouses is complete, you&#;ll always find humans in the mix of steel and software code. Human reasoning, experiences, empathy and logic simply can&#;t be replaced.
Want to see the world's greatest fears about automation realized? Take a look at JD.com's Shanghai warehouse.
A 40,000-square-meter facility like JD.com's would usually employ 400 to 500 human workers, but thanks to its many automated system, that number is cut down to just five. And those employees don't even do any warehouse work &#; they're just on site to service the machines.
The Shanghai warehouse wasn't always like this. It underwent an automation makeover at the hands of Tokyo-based start-up Mujin in . The company builds controllers and camera systems that it can then pair with existing robot arms to increase their autonomy and intelligence.
At JD.com's automated warehouse, the results of this integration are robot arms that can pick, transfer, and pack packages, while other robots zip around the warehouse floor, transporting packages to loading docks and trucks.
Despite all the signs pointing to the contrary, Mujin's American co-founder and CTO Rosen Diankov doesn't view automation as a threat the human employment.
"Introducing robots creates more jobs, and history has shown that's been the case," he told CNBC. "Companies that have embraced automation, like Toyota &#; it's the biggest car company in the world now."
The 400-plus people who would typically work at a warehouse like JD.com's might disagree.
READ MORE: The World's First Humanless Warehouse Is Run Only by Robots and Is a Model for the Future [CNBC]
More on automation: Automation Will Replace a Staggering Number of Workers in Major Cities
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