posted in Technology
Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work: It's an automation "arms race."
futurism.com/robots-and-machines/walmart-trouble-expensive-robots-warehouseReplying to @eicker@lemmy.world
Walmart spent billions replacing warehouse workers with robots, only to discover the robots can’t lift dog food and the engineers cost more than the workers did. Apparently the automation revolution has reached its greatest technical challenge yet: doing the job it was supposed to automate. Somewhere, a PowerPoint deck is quietly being deleted.
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
wsj.com/…/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b…
Replying to @reddig33@lemmy.world
Ocado! I remember watching a promotional video about this being the future of grocery stores like a decade ago, and always vaguely wondered what happened to it. The whole hive-picker robot-carts-on-rails thing seemed very well developed, but I wasn’t convinced it was really practical.
Thanks for closing that loop for me.