Each year around the start of December, Amazon
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It’s a question begged by the giant retailer’s decade-plus-long push into automation, the pace of which is ramping up.
In the past 18 months, Amazon has launched Sequoia, a new warehouse-management system while also starting to test “humanoid bots” built to hoist and tote items around sorting facilities. Last June, Amazon unveiled Proteus, its first fully autonomous warehouse robot designed to move about on its own, shepherding package-laden carts.
All told, a quarter-of-a-million Amazon-made robots, including a fleet of 200,000 mobile robots, are currently in use at the company’s facilities. Amazon’s flagship Kiva robots have automated repetitive tasks previously done by humans.
“Robotics by design makes operations safer and easier for our employees,” says Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson.
Proteus robots were conceived as inherently collaborative (i.e., safe to be around workers) and thus are equipped with “advanced safety, perception and navigation technology” that Amazon engineered at no small expense.
Just last year, Amazon set up a $1 billion innovation fund to spur logistics innovation.
While it moves, Proteus emits a green beam reminiscent of something out of 1980’s “Flash Gordon.” If a human worker steps in front of the beam, Proteus will roll to a sudden halt.
Accelerating at the moment—at Amazon and at warehouse sites everywhere—is the pace of supply chain automation. It’s a space that instills a sense of wonder among bottom-line-focused executives seeking to reduce the costs, headaches and safety concerns involved with employing human beings.
The difficulties of finding and keeping staff, plus the expense of onboarding and training, are among the main forces spurring bold steps, says Mark Messina, CEO of Addverb USA, an automation solutions firm.
The warehouse robotics market is projected to reach at least $14 billion over the next six years, according to Messina.
Safety issues complicate the landscape. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have any recent reports on warehouse injuries that involve robots. But labor unions in conjunction with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are keeping an eye on a range of safety issues connected with various types of recently introduced industrial machines, including Autonomous Mobile Robots, Automated Guided Vehicles and Autonomous Forklifts.
While robots are designed for safety—and for repetition— it’s variability which can lead to accidents.
Warehouses need to plan for the unexpected, says Vecna Robotics’ Michael Bearman, chief administrative officer and who oversees matters related to safety, operations and strategic partnerships.
Vecna is known for its AMRs which automate workflows that manually driven forklifts, trucks and tuggers would perform inside warehouses and factories.
“Safety training and proper signage are great first steps but there’s more to it,” Bearman says.
Operators need to consider the impact of blind corners, intersections with human drivers, poor flooring and low ceilings, among other things.
“At this point there aren’t any industry-wide statistics that prove AMRs are safer than manual forklifts,” he concedes. “That said, we know that our AMRs are guaranteed to be safer.”
Bearman insists his certainty comes from knowing the scientific intricacies involved in creating unmanned vehicles, built with multi-tiered safety protocols and software-abetted monitoring systems.
Self-driving forklifts are bound to be safer, if only because the person most often injured in a forklift accident is the driver. “By definition, driverless forklifts are less risky,” as BlueBotics, a maker of self-driving forklifts, says in one of its market research reports. The company estimates that as much as roughly 5% of the entire U.S. forklift fleet (of more than one million) is now driverless.
“Recently, numerous corporations have instructed their engineering teams to explore solutions aimed at substantially reducing or eliminating the need for forklift operators, with the target timeframe set around the year 2030, and in some cases, even earlier,” says Kyle McMillin, Bastian Solutions’ Application Engineer.
Bastian bills itself as a Toyota Advanced Logistics company. (Toyota currently dominates the manual forklift market).
The list of robotic options includes, among other sub-categories: autonomous forklifts/vehicles; automated storage and retrieval systems; and automated semi-truck loaders.
“When applied correctly, these systems promise an attractive return on investment,” McMillin says.
And these systems reduce operational inefficiencies while also improving safety, clearly a win-win, right? Not necessarily.
Workers need to be made aware of the unique dangers associated with working around or with industrial robots, cautions Kimberly Darby, an OSHA spokesperson.
Increasingly, U.S. industries are using robotic technologies to perform dangerous or repetitive tasks; and these systems are becoming more collaborative and more mobile in nature. “They introduce new workplace hazards for those who work with, and alongside them,” Darby says.
In 2017, OSHA, along with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the Association for Advancing Automation (or “A3,” formerly the Robotic Industries Association), formed an alliance to improve awareness about workplace hazards.
Vecna’s Bearman is a member of an industry committee, co-led by A3, tasked with drafting a set of safety standards for mobile robots.
Meanwhile, Amazon workers’ wellness—particularly at facilities with robots—is being closely monitored. Labor watchdogs assert, worrisomely, that increased productivity from automation is putting that much more stress on Amazon’s human workers, predominantly at sorting stations where they are tasked with doing the kinds of things humans do really well, like picking and placing objects of varying shapes and sizes.
Amazon’s Vogel pointed to publicly available data that shows the company’s robotics-enabled sites have lower injury rates than those without this technology.
In 2022, for example, recordable incident rates and lost-time incident rates were 15% and 18% lower, respectively, at Amazon robotics sites than non-robotics sites, she said.
“Safety and achievable performance expectations aren’t mutually exclusive,” Vogel emphasizes. “We’re clear with managers that productivity or speed should never be pressed at the expense of safety or quality, and we investigate reports of site managers using performance guidelines inappropriately.”
As far as all those extra seasonal workers, Amazon insists that it does not foresee hiring practices being impacted whatsoever by automation.
In the decade since robots were first introduced, Amazon has added more than one million jobs, according to Vogel.
As warehouse work evolves, though, workers in theory can expect to be shifted to more meaningful tasks—or to those that still demand a human touch.
(This article is the second part of a three-part series. Here’s part one, which drills into warehouse hazards, generally. Part three, on Monday, tackles the issue of man versus machine).
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