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Appreciation post: saw a robot arm sorting packages at a Memphis FedEx hub and it hit me how far this has come
I was touring the Memphis hub last Thursday for work and watched a robotic arm pick and place boxes for about 20 minutes straight. Back when I started in logistics 12 years ago, that same spot had six guys doing that job by hand. The arm never slowed down, and a supervisor said it handles about 1,200 packages an hour now. Kind of wild to think I used to argue with people that robots would never touch this kind of work. Anyone else seen these systems up close at their own job?
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tara70025d ago
That part about six guys doing the job by hand really hits home. We put in two of those arms at our Phoenix warehouse about three years ago. Biggest thing that helped was running them slow at first and letting the crew learn how the machines actually think. The arms jam on weird stuff, like a box that's even slightly dented or taped funny, so we started taping every package the same way on one line and the jam rate dropped a ton. Took about two months before people stopped cussing at them, but now the guys who used to lift boxes all day run the controls instead. Your mileage may vary depending on what you're shipping, but keeping one person watching the feed at all times saved us a lot of headaches.
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