Third wave automation
Imagine the future Blade Runner-esque workplace where human and robotic co-workers work side-by-side without it looking at all unbelievable. As it turns out, you don’t have to be a great futurist to imagine such a scenario: it’s been the daily reality of factory and warehouse workers for decades.
The term “automation” was first coined in 1948 by Delmar S. Harder, an engineer and vice president of the Ford Motor Company, to describe the transfer of particularly difficult, repetitive, and dangerous jobs to machines in industrial settings such as factories. The first industrial robots and automated warehouses began to appear in the 1960s — and the number has only grown since then.
However, not all jobs can be easily automated. Consider, for example, the job of a forklift operator. On paper (or, well, on screen), forklifts fall under the same task as many previous industrial robots: lifting and moving heavy goods from one place to another. But operating a forklift is far from easy or predictable. It requires significant awareness and decision making on the part of the operator. Forklifts can weigh significantly more than a loaded passenger car, have to contend with uneven weight distribution, turn with the rear wheels rather than the front, and can be difficult to stop. It is no exaggeration to say that they are more difficult to drive than a road car.
Operating a forklift is the most dangerous thing in a warehouse.
A Union City, California-based startup called Third Wave Automation, however, believes it has solved the problem. And it’s helping create self-driving forklifts as proof. Using expertise in fields from robotics to computer vision, Third Wave has developed technology that promises to help revolutionize the warehouse of tomorrow. The two-year-old startup that came out of stealth this month just announced a $15 million funding round to help it achieve just that.
“[Forklift driving is] dangerous work that requires certification, and historically it has been very difficult to retain staff,” Arshan Poursohi, CEO and co-founder of Third Wave Automation, who was previously a roboticist at Google and director of engineering at Toyota Research Institute, told Digital Trends. . “In terms of injuries reported by OSHA, operating a forklift is the most dangerous thing in a warehouse. We’ve heard from countless warehouse operators that it’s difficult to keep enough skilled people on staff to get the throughput from operations that modern supply chains demand.”
Third wave automation
Poursohi said he could not provide a list of customers, but that Third Wave is currently piloting its self-driving forklift technology. Using the insights gained from these tests, they will then create a commercial product that they can sell. Instead of building a forklift from the ground up, Poursohi said he developed a software platform that, with the right sensors, can turn ordinary forklifts into self-driving models. This could be used either to retrofit existing fleets or to license forklift manufacturers, who could incorporate self-driving sensors into new production models.
He didn’t give exact details on exactly what sensors they include, but said they are “things like lidar and cameras, things like [autonomous vehicles].” Judging by early Third Wave demonstrations, robo-forklifts will be able to recognize obstacles in warehouses or factories and then plot a safe course to complete the journey. Once there, they will be able to pick up and drop off pallets containing any goods that need to be moved.
Human factor
It’s no mystery why Third Wave would be interested in shaking up the world of warehouse logistics. Compared to headline-making technologies like self-driving cars or even food delivery robots, moving heavy things around a warehouse or “delivery center” may not be the world’s most glamorous sector, but it’s certainly a worthwhile one – in a variety of ways. There are an estimated 850,000 forklifts in the United States, a growing market that could be worth more than $13 billion by 2025. With tech-savvy retail giants like Amazon snapping up robotics companies they feel could help further streamline operations, it’s not hard to imagine a lucrative exit for a company that successfully automates this core business.
There are probably over a million forklift operators worldwide whose jobs would be threatened by a fully automated solution.
But what does this mean for the people involved? The demand for forklift operators continues to grow in the manufacturing, transportation and retail industries. Since there is currently no mainstream forklift automation technology in widespread use, this means that there are probably over a million forklift operators worldwide whose jobs would be threatened by a fully automated solution.
However, this is not what the Third Wave created as planned. As Poursohi said, the technology developed by his company still requires people to stay up to date; it just doesn’t put them at risk.
“The other technologies you’ll find out there take the stance of trying to limit the use case enough that the existing technology can solve the problem, most of the time,” he said. “Our approach to shared autonomy turns that around and addresses what the robot already knows it can do independently, while actively recognizing situations in which it doesn’t have full confidence. In these cases, we have built our systems so that we can seek guidance from an experienced forklift operator and then learn from that guidance so that we can build confidence to handle similar situations in the future.”
Third wave automation
A bit like the technology developed by Swedish autonomous vehicle company Einride, which aims to replace regular trucks with self-driving vehicles remotely controlled by truck drivers, the Third Wave concept still keeps people in the loop. It just means that one man can handle many more vehicles than he would if he had to physically drive them. Humans are there for edge cases where the computer gets confused. In the case of warehouses, this means that more goods can move through the same buildings with the same number of staff. Perfect for an industry like e-commerce that is growing at an almost unimaginable rate.
“We track a metric we call ‘fan-out,’ which is the number of trucks that one forklift operator can oversee,” Poursohi explained. “The operator does not actively pay attention to the individual forklifts, but is asked for guidance from the forklifts on demand.”
What does this mean for the future?
Of course, this means that the number of forklift operator jobs will not grow as quickly as other parts of, say, a retail warehouse might expand. The technology also means that, at least in the long term, operators could train their eventual replacements. As Poursohi said, “In short, the system keeps getting better once it’s installed and can adapt to the changes that customers will naturally make in their warehouses after we leave.”
But as with the 60-year advantage that factories and warehouses have over other companies when it comes to the joint work of humans and robots, this dilemma is becoming more and more common. Right now, the difference between what robots and humans can do often boils down to strength versus ingenuity. Robots perform tasks such as predictably lifting and moving objects. People do the rest. Amazon, for example, uses robots — originally developed by Boston-based Amazon-owned Kiva Systems — to bring heavy shelving to human pickers, saving time. The human pickers then use their human speed and dexterity to grab the right products from the shelves and place them in the boxes.
Third wave automation
However, this relationship is not fixed. Thanks to advances in robotics and machine learning, it’s changing all the time. Robots can now perform tasks that just a few years ago would have fallen under the “human” side of the job description. In the coming years, this balance will tip even more as robots become more capable and confident in performing an increasing number of tasks.
For now, however, forklift operators aren’t going anywhere — even though their jobs could change in profound ways. Welcome to the future of logistics in the 21st century.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn