Technology

Walmart is technically competent, but more pragmatic than adventurous. In the past, it has often favored proven systems that deliver reliable returns over expensive, leading-edge alternatives. That has been a smart business strategy for them for the most part, even if they are sometimes late to the party when it comes to innovation.

Amazon has made robotics a core part of its fulfillment model. Ocado designed its grocery fulfillment operation around automation from the outset. This meant major investment in infrastructure, software, and process redesign.

Walmart has invested heavily in robotics, too, but its approach has been more incremental and constrained by the need to modernize an enormous existing network. A bolt-on, if you will.

So I suspect Walmart's problems are partly about its approach and baggage, not the state of robotics. They'll figure it out eventually.

"We'll pay billions in trying to automate things to avoid paying a few million for human employees."

unskilled warehouse workers.

It's ironic to call them unskilled in an article describing how their skills are beyond billion-dollar robots.

Anyone who has tried to automate anything beyond the most basic step quickly finds out how difficult it is to truly do it with all of the boundary conditions, bad inputs, breaking conditions, etc.

As a forklift monkey: I hate my job and feel that humans weren’t meant for this monotonous kind of work. Like boomers who screwed in one nut on an assembly line who made enough to provide a family of 4, I’d blow my brains out before I’d do that. So fuck these jobs.

I work in this field and can speak to these systems.

These systems tend to perform quite well as their primary selling point is not necessarily cost reduction, flat, but rather increased revenue through higher and more reliable throughput. The trade off is that these systems are quite complex and normally require a great deal of coordination between the customer who may or may not operate the product and the OEM that builds and maintains it.

In my experience the biggest challenge is defining those responsibilities such that throughput is maintained. These systems are like high performance sports cars, they work well if taken care of and operated skillfully but can degrade faster as a result of lack of experience. Some of our customers permit us (the OEM) to operate and maintain to a greater extent then others. Given we have a greater deal of experience with the tool those customers tend to have measurably better performance.

To give an idea of why this particular industry has a harder time building the talent pool I'm referring to consider the domains that need to be covered.

Electromechanical systems, mobile robots, multi-robot systems, PLC programming, DCS, SCADA, multi-axis robots, VFDs, electrical power systems, relational databases, non-relational databases, message brokers, caching systems, distributed systems, Linux and Windows system administration, networking, industrial networking protocols (it's different), software development, Kubernetes. This is the skill set of one technical professional in this space.

I commonly deal with issues that cover several of those areas simultaneously. E.g. robot communications are slowing down due to full message broker queue which is determined to be caused by a faulty motor causing slippage which leads to a large number of messaged being generated that fill the queue and cause other bots to begin making pathing errors due to communication timeouts.

Walmart spent billions replacing warehouse workers with robots, only to discover the robots can’t lift dog food and the engineers cost more than the workers did. Apparently the automation revolution has reached its greatest technical challenge yet: doing the job it was supposed to automate. Somewhere, a PowerPoint deck is quietly being deleted.

Robots are more expensive and are less capable than people? What a surprise! Not. I saw that coming years ago... 🙄

Remember when the disclaimer "please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery" was practically ubiquitous on mail order packages? It's almost like that was a SANE way to run a logistics network!

So much of automation is trying to put robots in places humans were ment to be instead of designing processes that are for robots not people.

It's no wonder to me there is often issues

Link to the original article. Oh wait it's WSJ slop.