BY PETER BRADLEY, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
ROBOTICS
specialreport
THE WORD “ROBOT” DERIVES FROM A CZECH
term dating back to 1920 that means something on the
order of “forced labor.” Our more contemporary sense of
a machine capable of some intelligence and of manipulating materials comes to us more from the realm of science
fiction—the thinking robots of Isaac Asimov, George
Lucas, and others.
The robots that are increasingly found in modern distribution centers combine, in some sense, both of these
concepts. They are capable of nearly endlessly repeating the same action, work that is pure drudgery for a
human. And, largely as a result of improvements in
their underlying sensors, software, and vision systems,
And it’s that capability for intelligent drudgery that may
be at the core of why robots have a substantial future in the DC.
Earl Wohlrab, product manager for robotics systems and palletizing
for Intelligrated, a maker of automated material handling systems, lays
out why robots will be a good fit. “We’ve got a labor problem around several different issues:
finding qualified people and finding people that desire to do that kind of work,” he says. “Gone
are the days that someone is going to retire out of a DC. Nobody wants to spend day after day
in the back of a truck in an Atlanta summer. It’s going to be more than a desire to use robots;
we’re going to be required to go to robots.”
Brent Tymensky, vice president of engineering for Fortna, a supply chain and material han-
We won’t have androids picking
eaches anytime soon, but robots
used in distribution centers are
becoming more sophisticated and moving
deeper into operations.
Do robots dream
of piece picking?
