And we see not just the supervisors and the executives looking at these dashboards, but the workers looking at them: they can see how their actions are contributing to the output in the warehouse. “We put up monitors everywhere that that create dashboards. “We're really turning these warehouses into digital command centers,” Leavitt told me. That makes sense, but as we see Amazon start to use robots like the Fanuc 6-axis robot that can lift 1,200 kilogram pallets high into the air, and other smaller robots with dextrous “fingers,” for lighter and more delicate items, you have to think the days are approaching when all the jobs in shipping and fulfillment can be done by robots.Īnd, of course, managed by complex software to optimize timing and productivity.
“And the reason we haven't seen it is because the growth rate in the fulfillment warehouse area has just been so strong that the ability to find, hire, and retain labor is still the biggest challenge warehouse operators face.” “Three, four years ago, I worried about that tension, but we haven't seen it,” Leavitt says. It doesn’t seem to be something that any robotics company wants to admit, however. That may be a ways off, but it seems inevitable. Or, Locus and other robotics manufactures will create a class of robots that doesn’t just move product but essentially replaces the picking people in the warehouse racks, so that one robot moves the product while another robot gets it. And secondly, as robots get better, smarter, more capable, and cheaper, eventually the robots will be able to add the picking part of the job as well. The humans are essentially becoming part of a command-and-control network run by a warehouse or logistics operating system - which I suppose has always happened in some form or another, even pre-digital days - and are basically being told what to pick, when and where, by the robot who comes up for the next item. Of course, two things are happening there. Leavitt says one customer reported an 80% reduction in injuries, plus better job satisfaction due to less fatigue. That makes the humans more productive, Leavitt says. As a robot comes up and flashes some information to them, they can grab the right item and give it to the robot. Instead of two or three weeks to learn all the tricks of the logistics trade, they can essentially hang out in a specified area of the warehouse. The robots also reduce training time for workers. “Training” time for a new robot is essentially zero: connect then to the robotic network and they’ll be assigned tasks and integrated into the flow of work immediately. Locus ships robots via what we might call robots-as-a-service model, adding extras during busy times like holidays. “95% of all of those warehouses do this process entirely manually, where it's a person pushing a glorified shopping cart through the aisles walking. The problem? Almost all warehouses today do this entirely manually, Leavitt says. And now they're down to just a few miles a day because they're interacting with the robots.” These are people who, without the robots, would be walking 10 to 15 miles a day. “By doing it that way, we are doubling or even tripling the productivity of the humans in that warehouse, and we're cutting down on the amount of walking that they do by probably 75 or 80%. The robots go to the location where the item is being stored, and then a worker meets the robot there,” Leavitt says. “Our robots know what the item is, nobody has to look at a list. I recently talked to Locus Robotics CMO Karen Leavitt on the TechFirst podcast. Sometimes it’s just about lending a helping hand, and letting humans do what they do better. And boosting productivity isn’t always about the biggest, smartest, most capable robot that can go anywhere, find anything, take it off the warehouse rack, and bring it where it needs to go.
Locus Robotics is a seven-year-old logistics automation startup with $300 million in funding that’s on track to pick a billion items this year.