Increasing demand for faster fulfillment is driving the adoption of robotics.
Robots have come a long way since the Unimate, the first industrial robot developed in 1954 by American inventor George Devol. However, it was not until 1969 that robots were adopted wholesale, with General Motors the first to implement automation in its plant. Not only did GM more than double the production rate of its competitors—it also gave over jobs to robots that had been unpleasant and dangerous for humans.
The utilization of automation has been increasing exponentially since then. For example, in 2017, the United States had a stock of 1.79 robots per thousand workers—more than triple the 0.49 per thousand workers in 1995. Then the COVID-19 pandemic caused a worldwide disruption, particularly to the supply chain industry.
An executive survey carried out by EY indicates that efficiency and reskilling supply chain workers will be top priorities over the next few years. According to the survey, 52 percent of executives believe that the autonomous supply chain (e.g., robots in warehouses and stores, driverless forklifts and trucks, delivery drones and fully automated planning) will be ubiquitous by 2025.
One of the companies at the forefront of robotics is Plus One Robotics (POR). Engineering.com sat down with the company’s cofounder and CEO, Erik Nieves, at the Automate convention (June 6-9) in Detroit, to get his thoughts on what is driving the robotics industry, what challenges are being faced and what the future holds.
What Is Driving the Growth in the Robotics Industry?
“The biggest change in the American buying behavior has been the introduction of ecommerce,” says Nieves.
This growth has been heightened by the pandemic. Because of the closure of brick-and-mortar stores, as well as people’s fears of contracting the virus in public, shoppers turned to online shopping to fulfill their needs. According to Digital Commerce, an estimated $218 billion dollars has been added to the value of the ecommerce market.
Even now that brick-and-mortar stores have reopened, a survey conducted by McKinsey shows that the growth that ecommerce experienced during the pandemic will continue, alongside the growth of spending in traditional channels. From the onset of the pandemic until March 2022, ecommerce penetration was 33 percent, while year-on-year growth in ecommerce was 27 percent in March 2022.
Studies predict that consumers will now spend even more now that things are slowly getting back to normal. This is due to people having $2.8 trillion more in savings than they had in 2019, caused by factors such as reduced expenditure on travel, transportation and eating out, as well as extra funds from government relief packages.
“That means these warehouses have to push more volume closer to the customer,” Nieves says. “What used to be next-week shipping, became two-day shipping, became same-day shipping, became this-afternoon shipping.”
What Are the Challenges Faced by the Industry?
While robots have been whole-heartedly embraced by the manufacturing industry for a long time, warehouses are still a relatively new market. Nieves believes that the biggest obstacle they face in the automation of warehouses is a reticence toward bringing in robots when they are unproven in warehouses.
“Warehouses have successfully done their work for 40 to 50 years,” says Nieves. “Now that volumes are increasing and labor availability is tighter, they find themselves needing to bring more productivity and efficiency to their applications.”
The robots in the manufacturing industry can rely on repeatability, while that is not the case in the warehouses. “You don’t know what’s going to come down the line next. You sure don’t know what’s going to come down in two weeks,” says Nieves. “The robot has to discover every time, and that’s a perception problem.” This requires companies like POR to prove that the robots are successful, efficient, maintainable and durable.
The pandemic has also significantly disrupted retailers’ supply chains, with warehouses continually closing because of coronavirus outbreaks coupled with the surge in U.S. consumer demand for goods. These factors led to inventory shortages and more out-of-stock messages. As stated in the Digital Commerce study, consumers encountered 60 billion out-of-stock messages from online retailers between March 2020 and February 2022. Shoppers are now likely to see an out-of-stock message on one out of every 59 product pages, a 235 percent increase from pre-pandemic times. Further shortages are predicted to continue into 2022.
Nieves feels that there is a cultural resistance in the U.S. that needs to be overcome, as compared to other developed economies around the globe. “The U.S. is finally coming out of robot as Terminator,” he says. “The generations now have grown up with robots as a good thing. Japan’s been ahead of us for years on this front, because young children grew up with Robotboy and it was familiar and helpful.”
Europe is far ahead as well. As can be seen from the graph below, while the U.S. has overtaken France and the average of Spain, the UK and Sweden, it still has a long way to go before it can overtake Germany and Italy.
There is a worry that robots will take jobs away from humans and cause increasing unemployment. Now that robots are capable of transporting pallets and automating picking and sorting, workers fear that robots are becoming too capable. There is also a discomfort in sharing space alongside robots, especially amongs older workers. Workers have expressed concerns that with a lack of training, they could find themselves ill-equipped to work effectively in the case of automated tools breaking down. Although companies are trying to overcome this by training their workforces, the cost of doing so can be prohibitive. In 2019, Amazon spent around $700 million to retrain 100,000 of its workers to use new automation technologies––that comes out to $7,000 per worker.
Another hurdle highlighted by Nieves is the misconception in the U.S. that an engineer requires a four-year degree to be effective in the workforce and manufacturing. He suggests that vocational tech and industry certifications are a pathway to good employment and fostering adoption in the workplace. “The European model of apprenticeship is another way to do that,” he suggests.
How Is Plus One Robotics Improving the Industry?
Nieves cofounded POR in 2017 after realizing the market opportunity for robotics. “It became clear that the next major industry to adopt robotics at scale was going to be the supply chain logistics industry, and warehouses in particular,” he says.
POR decided to tackle the problem of success rate and efficiency of warehouse robots, which cannot count on repeatability but must deal with a huge variety in the size, shape and weight of items. POR builds vision software for logistics robots and its software helps power robotic arms to automate a range of tasks in warehouses and distribution centers. POR’s PickOne product relies on a system of 2D and 3D cameras paired with AI algorithms to detect packages and determine the ideal place to pick up packages. This enables a system of robot arms to handle the manual work of sorting packages, and to get smarter over time.
“The robot has to discover every time and that’s a perception problem,” says Nieves. “Plus One built a 3D-vision system that can look at cluttered piles of all kinds in the supply chain and then pull out one at a time and do the right process with that.”
POR’s PickOne Perception System in action.
The best example of this is FedEx, one of POR’s biggest clients. FedEx, being the industry’s global leader in express package distribution and the world’s largest express transportation company, deals with more than 3.6 million shipments each business day. In 2020, FedEx installed four robotic arms at the company’s World Hub in Memphis to automate its small package sorting. FedEx’s robotic arms are powered by POR’s 3D machine vision and artificial intelligence, along with an industrial computing system to run the software.
Interestingly, POR’s technology incorporates human intervention (Yonder), which sets it apart from its competition. The system is built so that a team of human crew chiefs can remotely monitor groups of up to 50 robots and intervene when necessary to handle certain difficult scenarios.
Behind the scenes of POR’s Yonder.
“I don’t believe AI is sufficient to keep up with the rate of change in the warehouse,” Nieves says. “It’s a rate of change issue. The change in the warehouse happens more frequently than AI’s ability to keep up.” When the robot encounters something it has never seen before, it alerts the crew chief, who then tells the robot how to proceed.
“That’s why the company is called Plus One,” he explains. “That network of robots in the world becomes much more capable and much more reliable through the addition of a human being. The human being is the plus one.”
What Does the Future Hold?
POR aims to elevate both robots and humans. “You had a person whose job it was to put those packages on that machine, and they were doing about 1,500 an hour. Wouldn’t that person like to be able to do 7,500 an hour?” says Nieves. “They can if they are put in charge of a set of robots. We elevate them from using their back to using their mind and make them more efficient.”
POR was showcasing a new technology at Automate 2022. This involved the integration of a robot arm with a vision system to a set of mobile robots. The sorting would be carried out by the mobile robots, but it would be POR’s robots that would be loading the sorting robots. This collaboration between the two different kinds of robots is something that has not been done before in the industry.
According to Nieves, POR’s hashtag is “Robots Work. People Rule.” This will certainly go a long way in assuaging the fears that robots will take away all jobs from humans.
