Walmart Looks To Drones To Speed Distribution

Megalith

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If you work at a Walmart distribution center, there’s a good chance your position will be eliminated in the near future. While the loss of jobs is never a good thing, not even the best worker can beat the efficiency of a drone at these tasks.

Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, is testing the use of flying drones to handle inventory at its large warehouses, which supply the thousands of Walmart stores throughout the nation. In six to nine months, the company said, the machines may be used in one or more of its distribution centers. At a demonstration on Thursday at a dry goods distribution center here, a drone moved up and down an aisle packed nearly to the ceiling with boxes, taking 30 images per second. Shekar Natarajan, the vice president of last mile and emerging science, explained that the machines could help catalog in as little as a day what now takes employees about a month.
 
This is something a robot arm could of course do from a fixed position, but the huge benefit in the drones is that they don't rely on that fixed base. You can operate any of them on any aisle, based on demand.
 
Sounds like it can do inventory on as well maintained aisle/valley/w.e your company calls it that's about it. Which mean you probably still need a person to properly face ID-labels on boxes outwards and make sure boxes aren't lost behind other boxes without being marked... Which is important to get your counts right but it would hardly replace workers, if that's all it does. Just significantly speeds up inventory process which i'm betting walmart gets outside sources to do inventory for them as they probably don't trust their employees anyways.
 
Sounds like it can do inventory on as well maintained aisle/valley/w.e your company calls it that's about it. Which mean you probably still need a person to properly face ID-labels on boxes outwards and make sure boxes aren't lost behind other boxes without being marked... Which is important to get your counts right but it would hardly replace workers, if that's all it does. Just significantly speeds up inventory process which i'm betting walmart gets outside sources to do inventory for them as they probably don't trust their employees anyways.

Check out the article too.
 
Drones can only lift so much weight, so going to need a human to handle the heavier loads.
 
Check out the article too.
I don't get it - so all these drones will do is scan a pallet which has been placed in a rack? I have no experience in this, but shouldn't you be able to inventory what comes in and subtract what goes out?
 
I don't get it - so all these drones will do is scan a pallet which has been placed in a rack? I have no experience in this, but shouldn't you be able to inventory what comes in and subtract what goes out?

Thats how I thought it was done. Only thing I can think of is whats in the computer is not whats really coming in. So if a truck unloads 100 cases of an item. But you only really got 99 cases, then an inventory check would find the mistake.
 
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