[tluyben2]

I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?

[arethuza]

"Why are humans still doing this work?"

Given that Amazon is no stranger to technology I suspect the answer is that it simply doesn't make financial sense. I suspect the capex on a standard Amazon shipping center is probably pretty low (lease a warehouse, put in computer systems, hire a crowd of temp workers).

[waps]

Take it from someone who's tried making it work : grasping is too fucking hard. It looks so simple, a baby could do it. A hand grasping objects.

Many things that many people believe robots can do are in this category. The absolute state of the art is balancing (not walking) on 2 legs (which does allow you to move, but ...), and walking on 4 legs (it's not really walking like for example a cat does, but it's better than balancing)

But the control loop for grasping arbitrary 3d objects given a camera image of the object and the hand ... such a stupid thing is a completely unsolved problem, and it's we're not anywhere near solving it.

Here's how amazon sidesteps that problem : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs&noredirect=1

[emilga]

On the problem of grasping, can you please comment on this video [1]? Instead of making a robot "hand", they have filled a balloon with ground coffee beans. "Grasping" and "ungrasping" then simply becomes sucking air out of, and pushing air into the balloon.

Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKOI_lVDPpw

[VLM]

"Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?"

Most real world engineering problems boil down to long term reliability. Its just assumed you'll get your statics and dynamics correct and all that basic stuff, the actual brain power burned on the job is designing stuff that actually works 1M times and tolerates every component being 5% off the exact value or whatever. I think this would be a huge headache in the very long term reliability category.

[emilga]

Thanks. I did not know this.

[waps]

What you see in that movie, the uncooked egg pickup, is becoming somewhat of a litmus test. Trying to reliably instruct a robot to put some 20 eggs from one basket into another without breaking any, and without prior knowledge of the position of the eggs and so on, that'll mean a lot.

[arethuza]

That's a pretty clever solution - move the shelving to the picker, rather than the picker wandering about.

[hershel]

Amazon recently purchased a company that builds warehouse robots(kiva robotics) for a quarter billion dollar. This company had sold systems for some reasonably large warehouses.

Those are pretty good signs that robots in the warehouse are about to happen in a mass scale.

Also ,there are rumors that amazon is building large amounts of robots , and will launch a service in 2015 based on those(just rumors).

And to the question why does it take so long? for many expensive technologies, 20 years from talking to industry acceptance is normal.It takes time to improve the technology in reliability , cost, performance , convince industry to use it and scale it.

[coldtea]

>Why are humans still doing this work?

They are cheaper. And it keeps them occupied.

[tluyben2]

Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work. I worked with people doing it full time at that time (and apparently not much has changed); most of those had damaged hips from walking the same way behind the carts they pushed for 10-15 years. And I can see why this would mentally affect you, although I must say that most of them actually liked it. I was setting up a software business and was telling about that ; they were just saying 'why not work here, no stress, it's great! never any stress and fixed paycheck'. That sounds different than the Amazon one, but you cannot really do that in NL ; you can set a 'realistic, sustainable minimum' amount of work they have to do, but that differs per person; you cannot fire or reprimand someone for not 'making the beep' if that means you have to walk faster than normal or even run for it. So everyone would be quite relaxed and yet everything gets done with the people happy. So cheaper but unhealthy maybe?

Also; I don't know much about the robots involved and what they would cost and how much prices are going to drop; seeing that humans are wasting quite a bit of space on the floor and have other issues, I'm not sure if it's cheaper? I'm sure Amazon calculates that often though , so I guess it is.

Occupied; I see that as a reason, but that's an issue anyway; we cannot keep doing it that for that reason (and they don't, but as you say). If the work can be done by machines, it will be done with machines.

[fit2rule]

>Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work.

My family works its own garden. We have a modest plot, which we push into production very comfortably, for about 8 months a year. This plot, which was once a 'pleasure-garden' around our house, replaces a family of 4's vegetable-nutrient needs at the grocery for about 6 months a year. Its a lot of work, mostly for my wife, but if I "didn't have to work elsewhere", the two of us could definitely have a much bigger yield.

The point I'm trying to make is that in fact, gardening for ones own vegetables simply has to get fashionable again. Even if you are a city-dweller, yes: garden culture has to push towards sustainable, edibles, as quickly as possible.

Which means, I predict the work is going to get easier, not harder. The false-economy of buying an Apple for 10c, which was trucked from a few thousand km's away, is really the end of it; our Pear tree gets us supplied good and plenty, and it costs nothing but a bit of rope to keep it propped up in the winds .. oh, sure, I did have to build a flame-thrower to keep the wasps away, but: that was fun!

[tluyben2]

Gardening feels healthy though. We live of our own fruit/veg almost whole year round. I think it's fun and besides my dogs, we can almost live on what we create ourselves.

[iSnow]

>Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work.

The short-term financial gain goes to Amazon (and to a smaller degree the pickers), but the long-term costs of an unhealthy job are paid for by the healthcare system. Therefore there is an incentive to create those jobs.