I heard on the radio that folding laundry still baffles robots. Laundry folding is a part-time job for all of us unless we have domestic help. Even dropping off dirty clothes at a laundromat is a job that none of us like to do. How great it would be if it could be automated?

This got me thinking about material handling robots, what niches they currently fill, what niches they are trying to fill, and why. These include:

• Picking items in and out of bins
• Picking cartons on and off of pallets
• Driving bins, cartons, or pallets around warehouses
• Pulling cases or pallets out of tractor trailers

The why is simple. It’s the same one we have at home with our dirty laundry. It’s not a fun job, and it takes valuable time away from other things we can be doing, but it needs to get done.

Conveyors paired with automation

Automation-based conveyors have been performing sorting tasks for a long time. Using conveyors with goods to person automation has been a staple in reducing labor costs and is a great example of human-assist technology.

Palletizing and de-palletizing robots are becoming more common, especially where most items are uniform enough to be handled autonomously. For example, products coming off a production line or manufacturers that bring in components that are mostly uniform in size. Piece-picking manufactured goods from a conveyor and placement into a carton is automated in several different ways today for static lines.

Dealing with various shapes and sizes

However, many DCs are sorting both inbound and outbound items that are not uniform in size, shape, or weight. Liquor cases come in many varying sizes. It takes a human to figure out how to stack each outbound mixed pallet. General merchandise DCs have every imaginable size and shape under the sun going to the stores. Even humans have trouble here. Overseas containers arrive packed floor to ceiling with various sizes and weights. There is nothing out there that can do this fully autonomously.

Many manufacturers have production lines that are not static, changing based on seasons or order levels to accommodate the client’s needs. Most automation solutions are not easily reconfigured.

Human-assist technologies do the heavy lifting

Looking at the laundry search again, there seems to be an inexpensive innovation. It does not fold the laundry but assists with it by using a four-fold plastic or folding board to flip and fold. That’s where we go when our clients ask for automation when there isn’t anything fully automated to do those tasks. Human assistance and collaboration make the job easier and faster with tools that complement the human worker. This list is long.

1. Collaborative Robots, or Cobots, work side by side with humans to do repetitive tasks faster.
2. In cases such as liquor distribution, it’s difficult to automate the building of the pallets when the cases contain a mix of different products. Vacuum lifts can assist with the lifting cases onto pallets. Automated stretch wrappers can then secure the cartons to the pallet for transport.
3. General merchandise DCs can, after taking a closer look at the inbound material, use robots to depalletize those items that fall within the size and weight limits. It takes a lot of programming, but if the flow of material is high enough, the ROI is there. The items that do not fit in the sweet spot must still be handled by hand. These should be the exception.
4. Overseas containers can be unloaded faster using a positionable conveyor, which reduces the effort required to transfer cartons from high or low positions onto the conveying belt.
5. Heavy items of all types can be lifted easily with assistance from an overhead vacuum or electric hoist.
6. The wire guidance system is a tried-and-true semi-automation in warehouses with many SKUs. This system takes over the operator’s steering but can now be assisted with automation that lifts and travels to the next pick more efficiently.
7. Simply adding a Warehouse Management System (WMS) can often speed up transactions in the warehouse. At the same time, it lowers mis-picks and lost items, resulting in lower labor costs and greater client satisfaction.
8. Automated horizontal carton, pallet, or cart transportation is here. Vision and location systems have achieved a level of sophistication that allows things to be moved from here to there autonomously at a lower cost than a human can perform that task. There are even new offerings that do the walking for the pickers. Keep the humans in the zone to do the things humans do best and do all the transporting via mobile bots.
9. Deep-lane storage for pallets can improve storage density and move material autonomously, allowing for very dense storage and leaving your warehouse worker to do other, more meaningful tasks. And the technology is improving every day.

Evolving Solutions

So, until humanoid robots become more sophisticated, let’s continue to build on human-assist technologies that can help your company reduce costs as labor becomes more expensive. Give Abel Womack a call and let us assess your facility’s challenges. There may be an assisting technology that can be beneficial while the robots continue to learn how to fold laundry.