[tt] "hive-mind robot overlords of retail"

[Donald P. Martin]

Swarm robots / narrow artificial intelligence.

http://www.kivasystems.com/demo/index.html 


Kiva Systems Robots being used at Walgreens, Gap, Zappos and Staples.
Robots add to safety in warehouse environment.
Human area subject to 2-3 accidents per month.
Human workers always 'on task' not standing idly.
Human operators prefer robotic area of warehouse.
  Less walking.  Feet less tired at the end of the workday.
  "I can do twice the work using robots." Productivity increase.
Workers are naming robots and giving them nametags.
Robots are sending birthday cards to humans.
Conveyors were more noisy.  Less noise means less stress for humans.  Less
yelling. Better communications. Better working conditions.
Training of new human workers is faster in the robot section of the
warehouse.
More efficiency per square foot of warehouse space.
Picking the order is much faster.  Customer gets delivery sooner.
No need to heat or air condition the robot area.  No need for lighting in
robot area.  Saves energy.
No 'shrinkage' in robot area.  Robots are more honest?
Kiva is a partner, not an 'adversarial' supplier.
New warehouses will be built to take advantage of robotic systems.
Battery recharge is 5 minutes out of every hour. 

Video of Zappos application:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdd6sQ8Cbe0&feature=player_embedded 


More information on Kiva Robots in the following article:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots/#previouspost 
Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses
By Alexis Madrigal  January 27, 2009
  
Next time you order a new pair of skinny jeans from Gap.com, you should know
that you are helping welcome in the hive-mind robot overlords of retail. 

Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous
robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you. 

All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to
go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure
out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on
it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes
from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just
the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every
hour.

"It’s a major game-changer. There’s no question about that. You can increase
productivity immensely," said Michael Levans, editorial director for a group
of supply-chain trade magazines like Logistics Management.
"The Zappos guys claim that from the moment you put your order in and it is
submitted to the time the box is on the dock and ready to be put on a truck
is 12 minutes." 

The robots, which in the largest distribution center currently number over
500, are built by a small company called Kiva Systems (no relation to the
microfinance outfit). In total, they’ve installed more than 1,000 bots at a
dozen warehouses and are growing quickly. By the end of this year, they
expect single locations to have systems with 1,000 of the machines. 

Dreamed up and executed by old M.I.T. buddies, these teams of retail robots
presage an automated future in which multiagent robotic systems put computer
science theories into practice. 

"The basic technology will be the de facto way to run a warehouse," said
Pete Wurman, computer science Ph.D. and a technical lead on the team that
developed the robot. "We’ll start to see these same techniques that become
the de facto techniques in manufacturing."

While the humanoid robotic visions of the 1950s have never come to
Jetsons-like fruition, less sexy robots have become indispensable parts of
many industries and service professions. A recent report by the
International Federation of Robotics found that 6.5 million robots serve
humanity around the world. Still, most of them are standalone or primarily
operated by human beings. Kiva robots are different: They’re both autonomous
and networked. 

What that means for workers in the warehouse is that the Henry Ford-era
distribution system of the conveyor belt has been broken into pieces and
distributed across the entire operation. Any worker (sometimes called
"pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the
warehouse and ship it out. 

"Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse," Wurman
said. 

The system adjusts to the nature of the products and workers, too. In a
typical setup, the humans are placed around the edges of the room. As the
robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the
warehouse for greater efficiency. More popular products end up around the
edges of the warehouse while more obscure products, like those acid-washed
bell bottoms, end up buried deep in the stacks. The self-tuning nature of
the system creates big efficiencies. 

"We find that it’s two to four times more efficient [than the average
warehouse]," said Wurman. "A big chunk of the benefit comes from the fact
that we’ve eliminated all of the walking."

The success of Kiva Systems could help teams of autonomous robots gain
ground outside the computer science lab. 

"I could see some of the techniques that we are developing being applied
outside the warehouse," Wurman said. "When we have autonomous automobiles,
you could imagine they’ll have similar types of coordination problems."

But autonomy won’t work for all situations, Lonnie Freiburger, a robotics
specialist with the U.S. Army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development &
Engineering Center. The military is looking more at "semi-autonomous" bots,
rather than ones with relatively full control over their actions. 

But Freiburger and the Kiva Systems engineers both agree that robots don’t
have to be humanoid to be useful. In fact, endowing them with
characteristics humans don’t have can be more useful than giving them eyes
or opposable thumbs. 

"Sure, it’s nice to have robots that can do what the humans can do, but it’s
also nice to have robots to do what humans can’t do," Freiburger said.
"Humans have physical limitations but the robots don’t necessarily have
those limitations."

Unlike the Honda ASIMO, Kiva robots don’t look anything like a human or try
to perceive the world through humanlike senses. They don’t use sophisticated
visual sensors to navigate; instead, they know where they are by using a
simple and cheap grid system that’s stuck onto the floor of the warehouse. 

That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate
controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by
robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard
warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to
the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working
around the people, cruising around in the dark.

While that may sound disconcerting, for now, at least, robots remain our
underlings — fetching our underwear, delivering our jeans — not our
overlords. At many sites, workers have begun to name their robots, complete
with
"Hello, My Name Is" name tags. From there, it’s only a short step to playing
fetch with your robot. 

"One of our customers calls those name tags tattoos, and the robots are
adopted by employees," said Mitch Rosenberg, Kiva Systems’ VP of
Marketing. "Your robot sends you a card on your birthday — this is a
corporate sponsored thing, so I asked the management why they let them do
it. They said, ‘We do it because the employees get a lot of joy, a lot of
happiness out of anthropomorphizing the robots and turning them into pets.’"



Business angle:
 
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2009/id20090415_876420.htm?c
han=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories 

Mountz, now 43, first grappled with the challenge of efficient fulfillment
as an executive at Webvan, the ill-fated online grocer that went under in
2001. Deciding robotics held the answer, he moved back to Boston, where he
had studied mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and earned his MBA at Harvard. To date, after two rounds of funding led by
Bain Capital Ventures, Mountz's six-year-old company has raised more than
$18 million, with annual sales topping $50 million. 
Robots have been around a long time, of course. The newness of Kiva, which
has four patents, with another 14 pending, is the way in which Mountz's team
has integrated three technologies: WiFi, digital cameras, and low-cost
servers capable of parallel processing. The servers work in real-time,
receiving orders, immediately dispatching robots to bring the required pods
to the worker fulfilling the order, and then returning the pods to their
storage locations. The robots receive their orders wirelessly, while using
cameras to read navigational barcode stickers on the warehouse floor. 
In combining these technologies, the 125-employee company is bringing a
potentially breakthrough innovation to warehousing and distribution, which
supply-chain research firm Armstrong & Associates estimates is $37.5
billion-a-year business. "Kiva represents the first really 'new' technology
in order fulfillment in years," wrote analysts at Aberdeen Group after
touring the Zappos warehouse last year. 
With plans for 1,000 bots in its distribution centers by summer, Walgreens
will be Kiva's biggest customer. "I don't need to tell my competitors how
much more productive it makes us," says Randy Lewis, senior vice-president
for supply chain and logistics at the Deerfield (Ill.) drugstore chain.
"It's been a good investment." 

Donald Martin