- [Narrator] Self-checkout,
food delivery robots,
entirely automated assembly lines,
robots have been encroaching on human led jobs for decades.
But now more autonomous workers are being welcomed
into businesses than ever before.
- We're getting machines in general,
the ability to sense.
We're combining those senses
with new and better forms of artificial intelligence.
- One of the hallmarks of the COVID crisis
and its aftermath.
There's going to be an acceleration
of the deployment of all kinds
of automation. - So what does this mean
for the future of the American worker?
At one FedEx shipping hub in Memphis, Tennessee,
it means working with robot pickers.
- FedEx is using
these robot arms combined
with an AI vision and gripping system,
in order to one for one,
replace a human who would normally be picking up packages
from one place and putting it onto a conveyor belt.
- This so-called pick step is
the single most common job
at E-commerce fulfillment companies like Amazon.
And it's been considered one
of the hardest jobs
to automate. - It's really been
the Holy Grail for robotics engineers
and artificial intelligence specialists
because it turns out that combination
of our vision and our flexibility
and our dexterity is the one thing
that you really can't replace in a warehouse.
But these robots are starting to encroach
on that territory. - The effort
to reduce human contact at work has accelerated automation
in other industries as well.
Temperature checking robots
and mask detecting sensors are policing airports.
Cleaning bots are sanitizing hospital rooms and outbreaks
at meat processing plants have companies racing
to develop robot butchers. - Industrial robots,
have been around since really the late 1950s.
But they couldn't see
and they couldn't sense their environment.
It made them very dangerous,
very strong,
very precise,
but they had no adaptability.
They could only do the same task over and over again.
A lot of the most spectacular work
that's been done in the past five,
10 years has all been in terms of vision systems.
When you give robots the ability to see,
suddenly if an object is not in the place
that they're expecting it
they can adjust and move and grab it just like we do.
- These robots combine hardware like cameras
and sensors with some form of machine learning software,
like the artificial intelligence systems
that allow for partial self-driving
in a Tesla. - And so once you have
a system that is trained
to recognize certain objects or features of objects,
then it can very consistently
and very quickly look at a scene
and in real time,
say like that's a person,
that's a face,
that's who sees this is.
Or this is a package and this is
how I should grab it. - Right now,
FedEx has four robot pickers.
Each is half as fast as a human picker.
But FedEx says they'll become faster
once lessons learned during this pilot phase are put
into practice.
Human oversight is still needed to help
with sporadic obstacles like
a fallen package blocking a sensor.
But FedEx says those snags are rare enough
that one human can simultaneously oversee eight robots.
- And because these robots can work 24 seven
and they're consistent it's okay
that they're a little bit slower
than humans. - Even so,
there's good reason shipping warehouse workers
shouldn't feel threatened by their co-bots just yet.
Demand for home delivery services is exploding
across the industry.
UPS says it's average daily shipping volume rose faster
this last quarter than ever.
FedEx says it can't hire fast enough
and is short around 500 human positions
a night at the same shipping hub that's home
to its robot pickers. - Amazon has invested heavily
in automation technologies
and even buying companies that do
a warehouse automation.
So that's clearly front and center.
It's, doesn't seem like it's winnowing
the head count because there's such a growth
in demand. - Mark Muro,
has been analyzing the intersection of regional economies
and technology for decades.
And while he agrees
that demand is protecting fulfillment industry jobs for now,
he cautions that similar types of work
in other industries are not as safe.
- People in routine,
non essential jobs have probably been laid
off now and probably would be right
to be very concerned about where they will be hired next.
- [Narrator] And not just because
of workplaces transformed by social distancing
or robots transformed by sophisticated AI.
But also,
it's looking like we're on
the brink of a global recession.
- Companies are looking
for new processes and cheaper ways
of delivering goods and services.
So they actually sign up for more automation
not less in downturns. - Just giving a machine
the ability to not just sense its environment
but make sense of that information
in some way to identify
where is my goal gives all kinds of robotics
these abilities to do things
that before were really just
the domain of humans
or maybe animals. - In the last decade,
a lot of these technologies became ready
for prime time.
And this is prime time now
so I do think we'll see much more accelerated automation.