Optimizing space and trying to keep things neat is a futile effort. Pickers and counters are constantly pulling things out of the bins and putting them back in, and during high demand it's a chaotic mess. If there are going to be robots being this meticulous at every step of the process, then it's too slow.
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
Real life interaction is anything but strictly meticulous. Inside an application (in silicon without bugs, not being hit by stray cosmic rays, not having software logic bug) things may seem ideal, but the moment you try to move a pole on a motor 5 cm forward, and 5cm backward, every day at the same time, you'll notice that ideal will have dismantled itself off the mount within two weeks
I agree robots breakdown a lot, however if you think robots are more expensive to maintain you may want to take a look at the cost of American medical costs.
>and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being
Fillpy the robot will not:
- need vacations
- go on maternity leave
- call in sick
- steal from work
- be rude to customers
- go to work hungover from drinking
- come in high/stoned at work
- sue you for X,Y,Z
- sexually harass colleagues
- go on strike
- start a union
All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.
Didn't they say this about LLMs but we still only have highly advanced slop generators, highly advanced autocomplete, and highly advanced search?
While they're impressively good in each of the aforementioned three fields, they're still not the world-changing technology they were supposed to be, right? (At least, not by themselves. When a very powerful human ties themselves to a slop machine, believing the output to be real, this can change the world)
The main achievement, besides search which is a very useful application, has been in how effectively we can get real people to believe total bullshit.
Mechanical engineering has a lot of practice on looking at failures and changing designs to make those less common or a maintenance item easy/cheap to fix. (they might have other options too, I'm not a ME)
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.