http://www.wsj.com/articles/fully-autonomous-robots-the-warehouse-workers-of-the-near-future-1474383024Fully Autonomous Robots: The Warehouse Workers of the Near FutureBy ROBBIE WHELAN
Sept. 20, 2016 10:50 a.m. ET
WILMINGTON, Mass.—When Target Corp. decided to revamp one of its biggest California distribution centers, it had a choice. It could build a new warehouse, it could install established technologies for picking products off shelves or it could take a risk on a new breed of robots from a reclusive billionaire.
Target went with the billionaire’s bots.
Target’s new automatons are from Symbotic LLC, part of a grocery empire run by New England billionaire Rick Cohen. Mr. Cohen, through his own national distribution network, and deals with some of the nation’s biggest retailers, aims to show that robots can overturn the business of storing, handling and hauling the cases of goods that retailers truck to their stores by the millions each year.
His sales pitch to grocery chains and retailers, including Target, Coca-Cola Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is simple: Symbotic’s automation system includes autonomous robots that can travel untethered among storage racks in a distribution center. They can move up and down aisles to stack and retrieve cases. They coordinate with more-conventional robots that perform simpler tasks.
That is in contrast to many other warehouse-automation systems, in which the robots tend to be bolted down or limited to fixed routes or tracks and are less flexible in what they can do.
“What we’re doing with autonomous bots is not that dissimilar from what Google is doing with autonomous cars,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview at Symbotic’s Wilmington headquarters. “I think within five years, it’ll change distribution.”
For retailers, the objective in automating warehouses is controlling the three big costs of conventional human-staffed distribution centers—labor, time and real estate—to meet the demand of the high-cost, low-margin industry.
“Every project we look at, we look at automation as a potential part of it,” said Frank Bruni, Kroger Co.’s vice president of supply-chain operations. The grocer has bought warehouse-automation systems from Germany’s Witron Logistik + Informatik GmbH, a Symbotic competitor.
About 6% of Kroger’s distribution centers are fully automated, Mr. Bruni said, and a warehouse-worker shortage, rising wages and other factors are driving the company to look at more robotic systems. “Twenty-five, 30 years ago, there were a lot of folks who made careers working in warehouses. Today I don’t think that dynamic exists as much.”
Target in 2013 wanted to expand its Woodland, Calif., distribution center to keep up with rising Southwest sales. It considered building a new center, then went with Symbotic in 2014.
“Target was going to have to build a new facility in California, which is horrendously expensive,” said Larry Sweet, a Georgia Tech robotics professor who was Symbotic’s chief technology officer until last year and worked on the Target project. “They wanted that facility to handle more volume, but they couldn’t do it. Symbotic was able to put a system in the building that helped that.”
Trucks unload cases of products, which are ferried by a forklift and unwrapped.
A stationary robot separates the load into individual cases of each product. The cases are recorded into Symbotic’s software system and travel by conveyor to…
…”The Box," a huge metal enclosure divided into multiple levels, each with multiple aisles.
Symbotic's autonomous robots zoom up and down aisles at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour, storing and retrieving cases of food products. The aisles are about 28 inches wide.
Robots arrange cases in the order determined by software and assemble them into "perfect pallets" according to a grocery store’s layout.
Another robot wraps the pallets, which can be up to 9 feet high, with plastic wrap.
The pallets are loaded into a truck and shipped to the supermarket.
Until now, consumer-products retailers have found it hard to automate even simple procedures such as picking products off a rack and assembling odd-shaped containers on a pallet. Such tasks were performed by about 867,300 people in warehouses across the U.S. as of August, according to the most recent Labor Department data.
Food, in particular, has resisted robots. In the food-and-beverage sector, where Mr. Cohen got his start, just 8% of distribution centers owned by the 75 largest North American grocers are partially or fully automated, according to supply-chain consultancy MWPVL International Inc. Food wholesalers and distributors operate on thin profit margins—typically 1% to 2%—making them reluctant to invest in automation, which can cost up to $100 million for a warehouse.
That attitude is shifting as rising labor and land costs threaten profits. And they face increased competition from Amazon.com Inc. and other technology firms that are overturning longstanding practices.
Labor impact
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, representing 122,000 grocery-warehouse workers, has been put on the defensive by the rise of automation, said Steve Vairma, head of the union’s warehouse division. “Employers are looking to move more and more into automation,” he said, “and I think we’re going to be faced with those challenges in contract negotiations in coming years.”
Mr. Cohen’s Symbotic approach is ambitious because use of autonomous industrial robots is still in its infancy. Developing robots that can work untethered has been something of a crusade for engineers at manufacturers such as Boeing Co., which are spending heavily on them. A robot that knows its way around a factory, the argument goes, can do assembly tasks more efficiently than its fixed-in-place ancestors.
It is still difficult for robots to perform precise tasks in chaotic environments, said Martial Hebert, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who specializes in vision and recognition systems for autonomous robots. Advanced sensors and software are bringing down some of those barriers, he said.
“The areas in which automation moves the fastest are the areas where the environment is the most structured, things like factories or warehouses with limited amounts of products,” Mr. Hebert said. “We’re getting to the point where the technology is really moving to the real world.”
Mr. Cohen is carrying out his experiment through C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc., the country’s largest wholesale grocery distributor by sales, of which he is the third-generation chief executive.
His strategy has two prongs: Install robots in C&S warehouses to serve grocery chains, and sell them to companies that have their own distribution facilities. Over the next year, Symbotic plans to roll out nearly a dozen fully-automated food warehouses across the country from Pennsylvania to California, serving grocery chains.
He has reached an agreement to supply robots to Target and Coke’s distribution facility in South Brunswick, N.J.
Wal-Mart said it is testing Symbotic’s system for use in up to two of its large distribution centers. Wal-Mart is interested in how the robots allow it to store more products in its warehouses.
Symbotic said its system allows food retailers and wholesalers to cut distribution-center labor costs by 80% and operate warehouses that are 25% to 40% smaller.
The company faces competition in the U.S. market from companies such as Atlanta-based Dematic Corp. and Austria’s Knapp AG, which have installed systems that use robots to store and retrieve cases of food and consumer products. A number of smaller companies are working on ways of using autonomous robots to pick and pack individual items to fulfill online-shopping orders directly to customers.
For evidence robots work in food warehouses, U.S. distributors can look to Europe, where land and labor costs are higher and automation in food distribution is more common.
“In the long run, if you don’t automate, eventually…it will really limit your supply chain,” said Norman Leonhardt, head of sales for Witron, the German automation firm. “America is moving towards it. There aren’t enough young people coming into the workforce who really want to work in warehouses.”
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