FedEx follows Amazon.com into robotic future
KERNERSVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA: 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 630,000-square-foot (58,529-squaremetre) 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. Horns honking and warning lights flashing, 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 rippling through the worlds of shipping and online retail, was the first significant deployment of mobile robots inside a FedEx hub.
Amazon.com and e-commerce shopping habits are big reasons it’s happening.
In 2012, Amazon acquired a robotics company called Kiva. Since then, it has moved many of that company’s robots into its network of more than 210 fulfillment and package-sorting centers.
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 in Kernersville. “It just might be in a different place.”
“As people have become more comfortable buying online, big and bulky goods like car tyres, canoes and boxes as big as a coffin have accounted for an increasing percentage of the packages flowing through FedEx’s distribution centers,’’ 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.
Steele did not envision pink slips when he saw the first Vecna robot.
“I understand people thinking this will take their jobs,” he said on a recent Monday morning inside the hub. “But over time, they realise that is not the case at all.”
But those fears were not unfounded. In a recent report, the McKinsey Global Institute, a business research organisation, predicted that about one-third of US workers will have to switch occupations because of technology-driven automation by 2030.
“What people underestimate is the time needed for this to happen,” said Michael Chui, a partner with McKinsey.
“Workers who once spent part of their time driving tuggers might spend more time lifting boxes onto trailers or stacking those boxes inside delivery trucks bound for other parts of the country. But overall, the workforce inside the hub will grow, not shrink,’’ Steele said.
For Steele, a 24-year FedEx veteran, this is just another step on a long and gradual climb toward greater automation — a march that began decades ago with automatic scanners and sorters.
The North Carolina hub is already highly automated; more than 80% of packages move across the facility through a system of conveyor belts, scanners and sorters that needs no human labour.
When a truck filled with packages arrives, workers load the bulky items onto trailers hitched to a robot. Once these trailers are full, they press a button that sends the vehicle on its way.
Equipped with laser-based sensors, cameras and other navigation tools, the robots stop when people or other vehicles get in the way. In some cases, they even figure out a new way to go.
But 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 centers and more workers — both machines and humans.