DC Velocity - October 2011

The dawning realization is that robots and robotics haven’t suddenly and miraculously appeared. They have quietly evolved from earlier applications of productivity, quality, and cost improvements. Frankly, we should be expecting continuing evolution and not be standing back waiting for mechanical butlers to greet us with a tall, cool one at the end of a hard day.

CURRENT AND EMERGING STATE(S)

In today’s robotics, the evolution continues. Our work might not be as exciting as the employment of drones to replace human pilots and aircraft in far-off military operations.

But in the realm of bringing work to people, rather than making people travel to where the work is within the DC, advanced systems control location and movement of relatively small pods that both contain products and convey them to a human for pick/pack/ship activities. Think of a massive high-tech carousel that is directed by a control system, with little devices scurrying back and forth all over the facility. A Massachusetts company, Kiva Systems, is at the moment the best-known developer of this family of robotics.

There’s more. Pittsburgh’s Seegrid continues to expand the capabilities of its family of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), which includes robotic trucks. ThyssenKrupp Krause manufactures a parcel handling robot (Paketroboter) that unloads loose parcels of varying sizes from a truck to a conveyor.

Jervis B. Webb, now a part of Japan’s Daifuku, pioneered driverless forklifts that could move pallets from the end of a production line to rack storage, bulk storage, or a loading staging area, occasionally even being able to drop loads into trailers. And at least one company, Belgium’s Egemin, provides robotics to load trailers and intermodal containers.

Jungheinrich in Germany continues to develop driverless lift truck varieties and capabilities. Kollmorgen, a Swedish company, adapts existing lift truck fleets to be driverless, and Genco, the product life-cycle specialist, has married the Kollmorgen system with Sky-Trax guidance systems, which eliminates conventional guidance systems, including lasers, for robotic trucks.

Once a dream, now there are several mixed-case pallet building robotics, including some that are integrated with AS/RS installations, notably from Daifuku.

AND NEXT?

It should be clear that we’ve not yet reached Utopia— however Utopia might be defined in a world that is experiencing far from full employment. It should be equally clear that the development of increasingly capable and complex productivity tools will not stop and will probably, in our

opinion, speed up.

With exponential increases in the power and value proposition of technology-enabled tools—robotics, if you will—the automation of supply chain and logistics tasks once the exclusive province of humans will march on.

On balance, this is a really good thing. We will be more productive—and more competitive. And the nasty, uncomfortable, and dangerous work will be done by machines.

On the flip side, the nature of jobs will continue to shift, and not all displaced workers will be able to keep pace. The education—and native intelligence—required for future DC operational work will escalate.

These developments will pose challenges for both managers and working associates, and the time to start thinking about long-term societal and individual implications is probably right now. ;

Art van Bodegraven, practice leader at S4 Consulting, may be reached at (614) 336-0346 or avan@columbus.rr.com. You can read his blog at http://blogs. dcvelocity.com/the_art_of_art/. Kenneth B. Ackerman, president of The Ackerman Company, can be reached at (614) 488-3165 or ken@warehousing-forum.com.