If any job seems tailor-made for robots instead of people, it's pulling products off warehouse shelves to fill online orders. At least that's the argument Buchs, Switzerland-based warehouse 'bot maker Swisslog proposes in a new video showing off the first U.S. e-commerce distribution center to get its robots up and running.
In the video (above), the warehouses move in a dance of effortless efficiency, a 21st-century tableau of mathematics choreographed in metal. Cut to humans slogging through dreary aisles of cardboard boxes.
Swisslog's system employs a three-dimensional metal grid in which each cube contains a plastic bin filled with a specific product. The robots, which look like oversized red wagons mounted with a small crane, skate across the top of the grid and hoist the bins containing the ordered items. The robots then deposit the bins at work stations, where stationary humans pull the actual product out of the bin as they assemble orders for packing and shipping.
The video shows the Libertyville, Illinois, distribution center of Medline Industries Inc., a medical supply company. Currently the system is handling just a small percentage of Medline's orders, says Bill Leber, director of business development for Swisslog, but will ultimately handle all orders for the 125,000 different products Medline sells. (Update: Medline says that number has increased to 350,000.)
Swisslog markets its robots in the video as a way to spare humans the backbreaking work of filling orders in e-commerce warehouses. The sometimes harsh conditions faced by workers charged with keeping online retailers' massive engines of efficiency running have been well documented by journalists — miles upon miles walked each day, injuries inflicted by the relentless pace, the emotional trauma of being forced to act like a machine.
But replacing human warehouse workers with robots isn't just a humanitarian gesture, according to the video's pitch. In distribution centers, efficiency is a pure numbers game. And who's better at that — robots or the imperfect, inconsistent humans made to act like them?
"Humans are still needed to walk up and down aisles gathering products to complete orders — in essence, shopping behind the scenes," the video's narrator says. "Each worker's size, strength, speed and surely fatigue, all play a factor in fulfilling an order."
Swisslog's "Click&Pick" robots, on the other hand, can work up to five times faster than the fastest humans, the video promises. The work is "all done by robots who never get tired, work at a constant speed and work happily 22 hours a day." The company says the system can pull up to 1,000 items per hour and deliver them to human co-workers for packing and shipping. Bill Leber, director of business development at Swisslog, says in the future, robots will handle that final part of the workflow as well.
I asked Leber if the workers in the video would end up losing their jobs as Medline's robotic warehouse system reaches its goal of handling all the company's orders. He says they won't. Some will man the workstations, he says. Others will be re-assigned to new roles in what he describes as Medline's fast-growing business.
Leber bristles at the broader charge that warehouse automation is a job-killer. He says in better economic times, online retailers had trouble keeping their warehouses staffed at all because the work was so undesirable. To illustrate what he considers the absurdity of companies forgoing automation in order to keep more people employed, he says to imagine the government banning all automation in farm work: Unemployment would disappear overnight.
In Leber's analogy, replacing humans with robots in warehouses serves the same purpose: letting machines do jobs that we humans aren't well-suited for in the first place.
"As the economy comes back," he says, "we're replacing the jobs of last resort."
