ToaLanjiao comments on Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work: It's an automation "arms race."

[–] ToaLanjiao@lemmy.world 72 points 1 week ago (7 children)

The system designers get tripped up by the strangest things. I once worked in a factory that uses copper bars of varying lengths, and the designer didn't expect the bars to 'sag' when picked up flatwise from the middle. So I can imagine picking up a bag of dog food would do that.

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[–] toiletobserver@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (5 children)

That's a bad engineer problem. Tasks must be reduced to absolute minimums, and operating scenarios must be maximized. Otherwise failure conditions will win.

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[–] DrunkenPirate@feddit.org 39 points 1 week ago (4 children)

They might have underestimated the mix of items. From bagged dog food with 20kg, boxes of all shapes down to small poly‘s is hard to handle. For picking robots as well as the sorting AGV‘s.

Amazon didn’t robotize its entire item spectrum yet, as far as I know. It focus on robotizable items.

If such a heavy dog food bag brakes, all the small pieces lie on the floor that those dumb AGV‘s drive upon. That’s immediately causing clogged wheels and even more. And to clean the mess up, one has to stop the entire AGV area as it’s not safe for humans to enter. One broken dog food bag can cause some expensive maintenance and drives operational costs up. 1 broken bag per month can likely kill your business case.

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