The usual standard for automation, I believe, is 18-24 months salary - if the capital cost can be recouped in two years automation is worthwhile. For hundreds of well-paid truckers that's a relatively generous target, but automating a reliable gas pumping system just to save on one minimum-wage gas pumper looks like a much lower ROI.
I recently spent $100,000 on some automation for my factory. The first $60,000 was for a machine that will take an outside supplier cost of $5000 per month, and replace it with a machine payment of $1000 per month. I now need to supply an operator, space, electrical and consumables, but I save $4000 to do that with. My 'new' worker will be just one of the existing workers (or myself) who will push the buttons on this mostly automated machine. The human still needs to load and unload the machine.
The other $40,000 was spent on NEW machines that automatically do NEW processes which we could never do before. I have a lot of pressure from the market to deliver new goods, and I have a lot of competitors both in the USA and in China and India copying my existing products. So this investment is about new streams of revenue (and I like toys/equipment!) . This is a $500 per month investment on the lease.
I have a reasonable expectation that the new machines could help us achieve a sales doubling in the next three years.
So in my case, 18-24 months salary replacement was never the thought process. It was honestly more about getting rid of a supplier, bringing it in-house to control quality and output, and saving money. I have a lot of automation, and I think the bigger concept most don't get is that the automation is way way more accurate and repeatable than a human. Quality goes up as costs go down. The quality part is a big big part of it.
Ok, so you have 3 employees working 24/7 for an average of a $20k salary (33% more than minimum wage). That's $60k/year or $120k over 24 months (based on Bartweiss' ROI estimation).
Do you think it's possible to deliver an automated gas pump that services 4,800 trucks per day (~1 truck every 3 minutes) for $120k? I don't.
Yes, its the software. And the software needs data to have the machine learn, given this data, a machine designed for fitting niches, can squeeze itself into even unlikely corners.
Except the employees are going to need breaks in between working and I'm going to just guess that manning a gas station in the middle of desert alone makes you insane pretty fast. So at least double that salary estimate if you truly want to keep things rolling with 1 truck every 3 minutes.
I'm not so sure - presumably these are going to be highway truck stops/gas stations. You're not going to leave one guy there alone and shut everything down when he goes on break, you're going to add another 1-2 people to the daily shift at an existing gas station, and share the extra load across them.
My numbers do break down in that one guy per shift probably can't fuel everything, so we might need to double it. (In states with locking pumps, he probably can, though.)
Not the first year, but the next pumps come with automated fueling as standard equipment, and we can write off the upgrades over the next few years for tax savings.
Until the automate the process of inspection and refueling it would be a good job to place people. Treat it like an airplane coming in from a flight. Support crew go out to verify the condition the truck thinks its in, fix minor things the truck called out, and refuel it. Sign off on the paperwork stating truck meets all acceptable Federal and State laws.
This is definitely part of it - humans are great at flexible-requirement tasks. Gas the truck, kick the tires, squeegee off the sensors, make sure nothing is obviously falling apart. Rather than paying one human per truck, you pay one human per ~200 trucks to do all of the minor, unpredictable service tasks needed.
It would also likely be prudent to have a human visually inspecting the trucks and able to perform small maintenance tasks. My car can tell me the tire pressure is low, but it can't change the tire. It can tell me the backup sensor is obscured, but it can't clean it. Maybe it didn't even notice it hit something/something hit it (like a fast, low flying bird) and now the fender is hanging off. Things that might need to be done in between distribution centers that would be easier for a human to check, at least in the short term.
Yeah, my guess is we'll see convoys of automated trucks first, with one operator for each line of five or ten trucks. In part for small upkeep and correction in real time, in part to increase the risks of straight up highway robbery... If you can blow out an automated truck's tires and know it will take a day for a repair vehicle to show up, you might as well go for it...
Trucks would be standardized and have sensors to detect many types of damage and the truck could be rerouted to an automated repair facility (or perhaps a repair vehicle would be dispatched). Visual inspection could be done better automatically.
Automation that relies on humans to minimally function is garbage.
There will always be humans overseeing automation for the foreseeable future. At least until we figure out what all will/can go wrong. There are humans supervising automation in factories and warehouses, just in case. It's simply a good idea until we have AI as smart and observant as a human.
By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?
After factoring in the cost of the robotics I suspect paying humans minimum wage is quite a bit cheaper. Especially given the diverse outdoor environments such a system would need to be maintained in
By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?
It's been done a few times.[1][2] The systems are rather slow and clunky, but work. Dealing with all the variation between cars runs up the cost.
Tesla has a charging robot.[3] This is much easier, since Tesla controls both sides of the interface. The car actively cooperates, opening the charging port door. Tesla also interlocks the car so that you can't drive away while plugged in. I'm surprised that Tesla hasn't deployed those robot chargers yet.
They did deploy one station, between SF and LA. They say it has barely got any traffic, so they aren't planning to build any more. Others have pointed out that building the station was a requirement to get some CA tax benefit.
There is no value in automated refueling - almost everywhere in the world drivers re-fuel their cars themselves, so there is no money to be saved by making this process automated. The only exception to this are some american states where you can't do it yourself by law.
Right now, to move one trucks' worth of cargo for one hour requires one man hour. i.e.: 1 man-hour per cargo-hour.
If you have a single human that full-services 200 self-driving trucks in one day, you have: 1 man-hour per 200 cargo-hours.
Sure, autonomous refueling is easier than self-driving, but self-driving trucks also makes the human relatively way cheaper to employ.