Ask anyone you know that’s worked in a warehouse. While the pay is decent for a job that requires little training in many cases, the work is extremely tedious. But with our ever increasing reliance on technology, it was only a matter of time before humans were taken out of the equation.
That’s where a Los Angeles-based inVia Robotics hopes it will make its mark. The company this week unveiled what it calls the first “goods-to-box” robotics solution, one that requires no human intervention at all. Robots do all the sorting, “picking,” and even packaging for shipment.
The first time a package might reach human hands is in shipment, a far cry from the human-dominated system we have now. That’s pretty crazy.
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InVia says it already has customers using its system. The addition of its robots doesn’t always mean unemployment for workers. One company uses the InVia system beside its warehouse workers, to not only deal with labor shortages, but to allow it to ship faster than it ever has before.
It’s also scaleable, as each robot is leased rather than sold. This means a warehouse owner could ramp up its robotic fleet of workers around the holidays to meet the demands of its business, and reduce its fleet during down times to save on costs.
The warehouse isn’t the only place that is soon going to go robotic. Retailers such as Amazon and Walmart are looking to drones as a way to skip the postal service and deliver directly to you. Soon, yours could viably be the first human hands to touch what you’ve just bought online.
“Drones have a lot of potential to further connect our vast network of stores, distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and transportation fleet,” Walmart has said of its own plans.
