FedEx follows Amazon into robotic future
Automatic tuggers move larger items, create more jobs
KERNERSVILLE, N.C. — As soon as the first robot arrived at a FedEx shipping hub in the heart of North Carolina tobacco country early last year, talk of pink slips was in the air.
Workers had been driving the “tuggers” that navigated large and irregular items across the vast concrete floor of the 630,000square-foot freight depot since it opened in 2011.
Their initial robotic colleague drew a three-dimensional digital map of the place as it tugged freight around. A few months later, three other robots — nicknamed Lucky, Dusty and Ned in a nod to the movie “Three Amigos!” — arrived, using the digital map to get around on their own. By March, they were joined by two others, Jefe and El Guapo. The autonomous vehicles snaked through the hub, next to about 20 tuggers that still needed humans behind the wheel.
The robot team, part of the automation trend in shipping and online retail, was the first significant deployment of mobile robots in a FedEx hub. Amazon and e-commerce shopping habits are reasons it’s happening.
In 2012, Amazon acquired robotics company Kiva. Since then, it has moved many of that company’s robots into its network of more than 210 fulfilment and package-sorting centres.
Now, many Amazon partners and competitors are moving in the same direction, including big shipping and logistics operations like FedEx and DHL. But what has happened at the FedEx hub may be a surprise to people who fear that they are about to be replaced by a smart machine: a robot might take your role, but not necessarily your job.
Yes, the robots replaced a few jobs right away.
And in time, they will replace about 25 jobs in a facility that employs about 1,300 people. But the hub creates about 100 new jobs every year — and a robot workforce still seems like the distant future.
“Everyone will have a job,” said Galen Steele, the senior manager who oversees the depot. “It just might be in a different place.”
As people have become more comfortable buying online, big and bulky goods like car tires, canoes and boxes as big as a coffin have accounted for an increasing percentage of the packages flowing through FedEx’s distribution centres, said Ted Dengel, who oversees operations technology for the FedEx Ground network, which includes 35 shipping hubs across the United States and Canada, including the facility in North Carolina.
These ungainly items can’t fit on a conveyor belt. That’s where the robots, which cost several thousand dollars and are made by a Massachusetts company called Vecna, come in. Kernersville, the home of the FedEx hub, is situated in an area that used to be known as the Tobacco Road. But as automation has increased inside factories and textile work has moved overseas, the local economy has sputtered.
“In the middle of a boom elsewhere, things really aren’t that great here,” said Andrew Brod, senior research fellow at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, who tracks the local economy.
The local unemployment rate is 4.6 per cent, modestly above the 4.1 per cent national rate. Brod estimates the arrival of distribution centres like the one FedEx opened in 2011 has provided a boost, creating as many as 120,000 jobs, a majority of which go to workers with no more than a high school education.
Most of the work in this facility still requires human dexterity. Modern robots are not nimble enough to unload a truck filled with randomly sized boxes or pack those boxes onto a truck at the other end of the hub.
“People are remarkably good at handling lots of different shapes and amazingly good at fitting those things into tight spaces,” said Dave Clark, who oversees robotics work at Amazon. “Machines, today, can’t keep pace.”
These companies, however, will continue to automate as much of the process as they can. The online retail and shipping markets continue to grow, and with Amazon setting new standards for fast and inexpensive delivery, everyone else has to keep up. That means more shipping centres and more workers — both machines and humans.