Dancing Pods, Dodging Forklifts: How Companies Are Using AI to Make Work Safer

livemint.com:

At Amazon.com’s EWR9 fulfillment center in Carteret, N.J., a warehouse near the New Jersey Turnpike, the workers don’t walk to and from shelves. The shelves come to workers. About 45,000 pods—the name given to the four-sided shelving units—are shuffled around the 1.3-million-square-foot facility on self-driving units that hoist and carry them to workers in a kind of choreographed waltz.

Those workers either fill the pods with arriving goods or empty them to build packages for shoppers. Most of the facility’s 3,000 employees, including the top manager, aren’t allowed to enter that area, even to lean over to retrieve an item they have dropped. The specialists permitted to move amid the shuffling units must don a specialized vest that syncs up via radio and acts almost like a sort of electric force field, helping direct the pods around them.

An AI system situated in the cloud helps oversee the pods’ movements. Amazon calls the approach of moving the shelves a “goods-to-person" strategy. The design, which uses artificial intelligence and sensors, is meant to promote a mix of efficiency, ergonomics and safety, with the thinking that it is ultimately better to have shelving units, rather than employees, scurrying around its cavernous facilities.

Globally, Amazon has about 750,000 autonomous robots to move around its shelving pods. Though most operate in specialized zones, its newest design is intended to mingle with workers and move around them as though navigating a cocktail party, said Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. “We include AI and [machine learning]…to make our fulfillment centers safer," Brady said.