Walmart's Groundbreaking Automated Dock Advancement
Walmart to operate autonomous forklifts to unload pallets from trucks.
As Walmart works to remain competitive with Amazon in terms of “Speed to Market’, it’s taking a more piecemeal approach to automation, through partnerships with a range of different robotics firms compared to Amazon owned “Amazon Robotics Division”.
The mega-retailer will roll out 19 autonomous forklifts from automation vendor Fox Robotics to unload pallets from trucks at four of its most modern DCs, and has bought an ownership stake in the vendor.
The deal follows a 16-month proof of concept that saw workers at Walmart Distribution Center 6020 in Brooksville, Florida, work alongside the autonomous robotic units from Texas-based Fox Robotics.
That Florida distribution center is the first of what the company calls its “high-tech DC.” These are warehouses where it trials automation and various other technologies, before rolling them out to its wider channel of distribution and fulfillment centers.
Walmart’s move to invest growth capital for a minority stake in the firm follows a $9 million venture capital round in 2020, which raised Fox Robotics’ total backing at the time to $13 million.
According to Walmart, the autonomous forklifts are a “perfect complement” to the automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) within the facility. The autonomous forklifts use AI-powered machine vision and dynamic planning to unload pallets from arriving trucks and ferry them to be inducted into the AS/RS, which catalogues and stores the goods. Meanwhile, the Walmart warehouse workers who used to unload that inventory manually have been “upskilled” to direct the forklifts to follow the most efficient strategies.
Robotic forklifts are emblematic of a brownfield approach to automation, which is to say that the company is effectively retrofitting existing warehouses with technology, rather than building that space ground-up around the tech. It’s certainly a faster and less expensive approach, though there may be trade-offs in the end.
So, why automate forklifts? In addition to efficiency, properly automated systems bring an added sense of safety. Around 95 people are injured by forklifts each day in the U.S. Imagine driving a piece of heavy machinery with blind spots and two massive metal prongs jutting out the front, and you can start to see why they’re potentially very dangerous — particularly in tight spaces with a lot of human workers hanging around.
Here’s how the system works: Associates can employ the AMR forklifts’ AI-powered machine vision and dynamic planning to safely and accurately unload pallets from incoming trucks. Pallets are then moved and inducted into the automated storage and retrieval system. From there, instead of unloading the pallets manually, associates using the forklifts are able to consider the best, most efficient way to unload trailers based on their own experience.
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