FORKLIFTS | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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it, which means the warring factions of a salary saving versus somebody out of a job. While the cold, hard figures argument is alive and well, automated forklifts may not be replacing warehouse employees, at least in some cases. “When you look at the manufacturing [and] the warehousing space where… depending on the type of vehicle they are driving it can be anywhere from $40 to $90,000 a year [salary in the US], your unit economics are very different,” says Landen. “The difference is, if I don’t have that
vehicle doing the work that I need it to do – me as the company, the operator – I don’t get my products out the door.” We would be willing to be challenged on this point, but the claims from Landen and others in the industry are that, in many cases, the demand for automated
vehicles is to fill roles that warehouse operators have tried and failed to fill with humans. A common gripe is that as demand for space and logistics increases, there simply are not enough budding employees to staff the facilities. “Labour shortage is an existential and
binary pain point,” explains Landen. “I had a prospective customer tell me ‘Our business is growing’ because they do a lot of e-commerce-based distribution. He told me, ‘If I could hire 500 more people tomorrow, I would, and I can’t hire 10, so I work every shift 30% or 40% understaffed. I have to figure out how to get more goods out the door with the people I have’.” Anderson-Sprecher of Fox Robotics made a similar point during his interview with the BBC: “The one complaint that all of our customers have, is that finding
MAN ALIVE: AUTOMATED SAFETY FOR MANNED FORKLIFTS
Modern tech has also been applied to manned forklifts to boost safety, rather than in the name of full automation. US-based Collision Avoidance System automatically issues audible and visual warnings to a driver when a conventional, manned forklift enters the vicinity of pedestrians. If the driver takes no action, then the system kicks in to on-foot employees are issued with lanyard-
presence by vibrating when it is nearby. Similar systems are also used to prevent
vehicle-to-vehicle collisions and to avoid impacts with automatic warehouse doors. wideband (UWB) control modules, which, as with the pedestrian system, trigger alarms in an absence of driver input, the vehicles are automatically slowed to a safer speed as they approach either one another or the warehouse door.
labour for warehouses is just so hard these days. They need to hire more and more people, and most of these warehouses are outside of major population centres, so by augmenting the people that work in these warehouses with autonomous forklifts, you can get more done with less.” “I was with another customer, doing
a plant walk with the plant manager,” adds Landen, in agreement, “this location absolutely embodied that. The population of the town has been shrinking every year for the last 20 years, and I think the plant I was at is the largest employer in the town.” He describes the rest of the site visit,
where the manager giving the tour announced the move to autonomous forklifts to the staff. Rather than positioning them as a replacement, the manager proposed moving drivers to other capacities and having them work alongside autonomous forklifts. “He actually took us to some of the forklift
operators and started talking to them, and I was surprised,” Landen regales. “He just asked them, ‘how many times a day do you get on and off the forklift?’ A woman, who not in great health, said, ‘I probably have to get in and out of this thing 50-plus times a day,’ and he said, ‘Do you like doing that?’ ‘No, it’s terrible,’ she said, ‘it hurts my knees, it hurts my back, I never know if I’m going to fall’. “He said, ‘What if you’ve got this other
work to do over here? You have to deal with the products manually, you have to load them onto this line. What if the forklift kept bringing you the stuff you needed to load and you didn’t have to get in and out of it?’ She said, ‘I’d love that, it would be fantastic’.”
xviii | November 2023 | Overhead Crane Material Handling Industry Supplement
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