Author: CADE METZ / Source: New York Times
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 630,000-square-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. 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 and our 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 work force 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 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.
Kernersville, the home of the FedEx hub, sits in the middle of the North Carolina Piedmont, the plateau between the coastal lowlands in the east and the mountains in the west, in an area that used to be known as the Tobacco Road. In the 20th century, it embraced textile and apparel manufacturing. But as automation has increased inside factories and textile work has moved overseas, the local economy has sputtered.
“In the middle of a…
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