RumRunningDevil@RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip
edited

Replying to @⁨eicker@lemmy.world⁩

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.

kerryh8er04@kerryh8er04@sh.itjust.works

Replying to @⁨RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip⁩

So I’m all for these kinds of systems. What I see coming from a legacy manufacturer is they have so many limitations and restrictions, or their CTO and similar departments refuse to accept some of the system requirements, that once they purchase a novel new technology system, it just falls apart. From my experience it has almost always been two things, either the vendor selling the service over sold their ability, or the purchasing company ham strung the project so much that it was doomed before it started.

But I’m still hopeful, you actually build a system that meets the requirements, you have a customer actually embrace the systems and changes, it would enable success.

en
RumRunningDevil@RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip

Replying to @⁨kerryh8er04@sh.itjust.works⁩

I’ve seen the same. My current take is basically “nothing about how we did warehouses transfers to this new way, and attempting to make them dovetail gives you the worst of two worlds”.

The cool thing is there’s so many neat new industries this can create. The downside is that, as usual, there’s a big disconnect between P&L decision makers and technical professionals.