Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

That's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are far too neat.

Slower than a human making one operation.

Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.

Part of my day job is Warehouse Automation - not Amazon!. I would agree with you on being slow, but it probably suffices to what Amazon want to achieve here. If your entire process, so stow, store and retrieve is automated, you wouldn't use these "pods". A lot of these problems seem so simple and easy to automate out, but it's really not!

Surely the robot does not stop at the end of the day.

The challenge is not only stowing objects. It is also optimizing space and keeping it clean. In that matter robots are faster and better.

Yeah, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse on two separate occasions:

https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...

and Inbound (or the previous person picking) was usually a bit less careful.

The article says they plan on it operating continuously for 20 hours at a time.

Optimizing space and trying to keep things neat is a futile effort. Pickers and counters are constantly pulling things out of the bins and putting them back in, and during high demand it's a chaotic mess. If there are going to be robots being this meticulous at every step of the process, then it's too slow.

There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.

That is why, in the end, only robots will remain. They are inexhaustible and strictly meticulous in all circumstances.

Robots aren't inexhaustible. They break down a lot and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being.

They're going to get better a lot faster than humans, though. The fact that they exist at all is remarkable.

Until they unionize.

The tortoise and hare allegory? Slow and steady wins the race.

It's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost.

If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.

Do robots rely on being ionized? I'd have thought a robot which wasn't ionized would work just fine

What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.

You're thinking of "Onionized", when their exploits are covered by one of the world's best publications.

For now.

Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.

Have you read the article?

    "The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities."

Neat is very important for consistent performance.

A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV)

A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day.

I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.

I agree robots breakdown a lot, however if you think robots are more expensive to maintain you may want to take a look at the cost of American medical costs.

Compare to a doctor who needs nearly a decade of special training. Or an engineer who needs a complex university training program.

Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)

Real life interaction is anything but strictly meticulous. Inside an application (in silicon without bugs, not being hit by stray cosmic rays, not having software logic bug) things may seem ideal, but the moment you try to move a pole on a motor 5 cm forward, and 5cm backward, every day at the same time, you'll notice that ideal will have dismantled itself off the mount within two weeks

Mechanical engineering has a lot of practice on looking at failures and changing designs to make those less common or a maintenance item easy/cheap to fix. (they might have other options too, I'm not a ME)

How do you get senior developers if you replace the junior developers?

>and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being

Fillpy the robot will not:

  - need vacations
  - go on maternity leave
  - call in sick
  - steal from work
  - be rude to customers
  - go to work hungover from drinking
  - come in high/stoned at work
  - sue you for X,Y,Z
  - sexually harass colleagues
  - go on strike
  - start a union

All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.

Sounds like a problem for some future CEO, long after current CEO has gotten a fat bonus from improving quarterly profits now.

Slow is fast is a saying for a reason. It is just as true for a human as it is for a robot.

You don't, you slowly cannibalize your business and industry. By the time consequences show up, you've already jumped ship with your golden parachute

"Meticulous" in industrial automation does not mean "Precise without the use of feedback-driven control loops".

By then the senior developers will be obsolete too

What data? Just try it yourself and see.

They're not paying for the fastest. If they get some by accident that's great, but otherwise they just want someone reasonably mobile that will be good enough after a week or two of practice.

Are you talking about the "Soviet Onion"?

Like every other Reddit-ism and internet worshipped rule of thumb. The reason for the popularity has far more to do with what makes a sound byte marketable to humans than it does with anything quantitative.

Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle.

A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.

If your point is that experience is not necessarily skill, I suppose that's fair, but in that case skill does not always tell the full story.

That's the neat part - you don't.

(The suits think that's a good thing)

Skilled. Not pedigree-filtered and trained and certified into a scarcity that may or may not actually be natural. Chances are most doctors or lawyers or software engineers would perform rather sub-par picking and putting in a warehouse.

Smooth is fast, slow is smooth, so slow is fast. You're applying that to the restaurant as a whole though, which makes human or robotic immaterial.

The saying I do believe has a difference between robots and humans. The idea largely being that human inaccuracy increases exponentially relative to speed. Ergo, slowing down can lead to dramatically bette accuracy and throughput. Though, robots don't necessarily lose accuracy because they are moving more quickly. Though, I'd agree it is likely that both humans and robots need "smooth" in order to be fast. The key difference is robots do not always lose smooth when moving at high speed.

Day one yes. put us in the warehouse for a few months and we would be as good as everyone. I'm guessing the woule only give a few days of training before setting us loose.

Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.

Of course the robots don't trip and fall breaking their back and sue the company, nor do they want vacations or raises. In fact the robot performance is probably rather consistent versus human performance.

Well the obvious answer is training. Medicine requires 4 years undergrad plus 4 years grad plus 3+ years residency. You might argue medicine can be replaced by AI similarly, but the issue is risk. That 11 years is to reach the point you can be trusted to make the really high-risk and high-value decisions, not to do the easy stuff analogous to entry-level software.

Software has been an outlier in terms of its high salaries requiring only minimal training. That implies automating it will disproportionately be both easier and more valuable than many other skilled tasks.

Didn't they say this about LLMs but we still only have highly advanced slop generators, highly advanced autocomplete, and highly advanced search?

While they're impressively good in each of the aforementioned three fields, they're still not the world-changing technology they were supposed to be, right? (At least, not by themselves. When a very powerful human ties themselves to a slop machine, believing the output to be real, this can change the world)

The main achievement, besides search which is a very useful application, has been in how effectively we can get real people to believe total bullshit.