"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
Meanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars.
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
I didn't flag your other reply, by the way, but I did vouch for it. Your retort about LLMs is spot-on, as was your point about how "they're all robot jobs." We just currently disagree on whether eliminating such jobs -- all of them -- is a good goal or a bad one.
You defended your perspective by arguing, correctly, that people take undesirable jobs because they don't have a choice. We agree there as well, and my point is that this is a form of coercion in itself. The status quo treats humans as if they were robots.
(And I really don't care if someone thinks I live in a cave. Life in my cave is actually pretty comfy. It beats the hell out of a warehouse or a cube maze at a click farm. It's a privilege, one I'd like to see more equitably distributed.)
Of course there is! Since you're here, you're probably a programmer or engineer, a student, or a dedicated professional in some other IT-adjacent field. How would you react if someone offered you a job in a warehouse?
Once you've thought that through, apply the same reasoning to human beings in general, not just white-collar HN denizens. Few people want to work a hard blue-collar job for the same reason you and I don't want to: we have better things to do with our time.
I'm curious how Amazon handles fire in the midst of their Kiva pods. Do they have procedures for retasking an army of robots to clear a path for humans to get access?
True, though the problem isn't just robot batteries burning up, but setting all the stock ablaze and this part is indeed feeding in atmospheric oxygen.
Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.
I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations.
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
Oh it wasn't trying to diss Walmart in this case. I used to work there (Jet.com -> Walmart Labs -> Walmart Global Tech), and I generally liked it. Some of the smartest humans I have ever known came from Jet and Walmart Labs.
Back in the early aughts when I was still in college, My roommate was an IE and worked as an efficiency engineer intern during his Summers. I vividly remember him talking about the company he was working for had a huge project to improve UPS's efficiencies. Their big improvements was to add dozens and dozens of conveyor belts in order to move the packages faster. He concluded his experience by saying, "Yeah man, its crazy, this is what the future is going to look like. This is how they're going to automate everything."
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indicates that shortly after the UK judgement they settled on terms very favourable to Ocado.)
This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
AutoStore losing a patent dispute doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them. Just looking at the patent dispute ignores that the first automated Ocado distribution centre was actually purchased from AutoStore, who had been selling their robot-digging tote system since 1996.
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
AutoStore's patents were deemed invalid in the U.K. because they disclosed the invention prior to filing for the patents, which apparently is not allowed under U.K. law.
Their patents were invalidated in the U.S. due to "inequitable conduct or equitable estoppel" meaning either that Autostore violated someone else's patents or that they led Ocado to believe that Ocado was not violating Autostore's patents in some way. Both parties indicate that the latter happened, but the usual remedy is just a mandatory license, so the invalidation of the patents indicates that the former also occurred. (https://www.autostoresystem.com/investors-press-releases/aut...)
* Ocado started modifying their own installation. AutoStore gave them the rights to do this naively thinking it was for their own use.
* Ocado started aggressively patenting their own modifications.
* Ocado then decides it’s going to build everything themselves, and also start selling their own version of the solution and compete directly with Autostore.
* Then the legal battle begins!
Broadly the main thing in contention is that Ocado patented the concept of the robot sitting above a single cell (ie tote). Autostore thinks this is obvious and shouldn’t have been allowed - their main reason for usually implementing a lower robot that sits across two cells is that it’s more reliable (lower centre of mass, simplified mechanics) but that they have now been blocked from just doing a smaller design of their original invention.
Autostore were probably naive at the time (they were still reasonably new to the automation market) and Ocado definitely had better patent lawyers - or at least as they were UK based had a better grip of UK patent law.
That can't possibly be what happened. First to file would not allow Ocado to have patented the concept of the robot sitting above a cell/tote as that was already part of the system they got and copied/reverse-engineered from AutoStore. Indeed, if what you hypothesized had happened, Ocado would be the poster child for an immediate return to the first-to-invent system as this would be precisely the scenario that critics were warning about: an unscrupulous licensor "stealing" an invention from the actual inventor.
Why can't it? I think you may have slightly misread my post in terms of the single cell aspect.
> First to file would not allow Ocado to have patented the concept of the robot sitting above a cell/tote
Ocado patented the concept of a robot sitting above a single cell/tote, not the concept of the robot sitting above a cell/tote.
AutoStore's initial system was the first to have the robot sitting above a stack of totes, however the robot sat above two cells in it's original design (a 'cantilever design'). The settlement actually means that AutoStore cannot develop a robot sitting above a single cell/tote (note that their blackline robots sit across a 'tote and a bit' because of this - see image https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/autostore-sues-oc...).
There is lots of historical complexity as with all patent cases, but the AutoStore loss in court doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them - it just means that Ocado have been judged to be legally allowed to copy them IMO :)
> Ocado would be the poster child [for being] an unscrupulous licensor "stealing" an invention from the actual inventor.
They absolutely are the poster child for this in the material handling world! This is widely known in the logistics industry.
> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore".
I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.
Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
Truth has no place in a court of law. The fact that they won the lawsuit does not imply they are innocent. It could simply mean that they had better lawyers.
The warehouse automation industry has long had problems with scaling systems up.
A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.
That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.
It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.
Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
Labor is one of the most expensive parts of running a business. So just doing the math of, if we spend X amount of money on robots and can layoff Y amount of people then it's a net gain. Especially if a single machine can replace multiple people.
Also fixed equipment / robots do not ramp up when the demand increases.
On the other hand you can always hire more
People to sort more packages. You don’t even need a building, a tent would suffice.
What these companies do is conceptually very simple. Basically sortation of items at different granularities and locations. Not comparable with manufacturing companies.
Only sometimes and costs change over time. The first robot is almost always more expensive than a human, but the second robot comes after the design is done and so it generally cheaper than the human (accountants will figure out how to amortize these costs and thus give us a better picture of costs.)
Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
I've picked orders. If I have to touch your purchase for 20 seconds it is a very long time. There are 180 chunks of 20 seconds in an hour. If the pay is $45 per hour it would cost 25 cents.
The later is a much easier problem.