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

I work in this field and can speak to these systems.

These systems tend to perform quite well as their primary selling point is not necessarily cost reduction, flat, but rather increased revenue through higher and more reliable throughput. The trade off is that these systems are quite complex and normally require a great deal of coordination between the customer who may or may not operate the product and the OEM that builds and maintains it.

In my experience the biggest challenge is defining those responsibilities such that throughput is maintained. These systems are like high performance sports cars, they work well if taken care of and operated skillfully but can degrade faster as a result of lack of experience. Some of our customers permit us (the OEM) to operate and maintain to a greater extent then others. Given we have a greater deal of experience with the tool those customers tend to have measurably better performance.

To give an idea of why this particular industry has a harder time building the talent pool I’m referring to consider the domains that need to be covered.

Electromechanical systems, mobile robots, multi-robot systems, PLC programming, DCS, SCADA, multi-axis robots, VFDs, electrical power systems, relational databases, non-relational databases, message brokers, caching systems, distributed systems, Linux and Windows system administration, networking, industrial networking protocols (it’s different), software development, Kubernetes. This is the skill set of one technical professional in this space.

I commonly deal with issues that cover several of those areas simultaneously. E.g. robot communications are slowing down due to full message broker queue which is determined to be caused by a faulty motor causing slippage which leads to a large number of messaged being generated that fill the queue and cause other bots to begin making pathing errors due to communication timeouts.

These systems are MASSIVELY complicated and require quite a bit of technical know-how.

You named one main problem here.

The other ist cost. How much does a system cost that replaces one worker cost? INCLUDING the required technically skilled service staff?