OTA Dispatch Issue 4 2018

33 www.ortrucking.org Issue 4 | 2018 You see it on the news every day. What used to be reserved for sci-fi movies is becoming a reality. Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have long been “invading” manufacturing and other industries. Going from fanciful fiction to functional implementation is a process, but progress is being made and the trucking industry, like many others, is already take steps to incorporate these new technologies into their operations. OTA member XPO Logistics is one company open to, and actively pursuing, artificial intelligence and robotics as part of their operations. Here’s how. Towards a Collaborative Future By Ashfaque Chowdury, President, Supply Chain— Americas and Asia Pacific, XPO Logistics Digital has completely rewired customer expectations. We know this. We’re living it every day. It’s why XPO invests more than $450 million each year in technology, choosing the projects that are on the cutting edge of innovation and have the potential to transform the industry. Sometimes that means innovating in-house. We are, for example, using AI and machine learning to optimize pallet distribution in trailers, dynamically predict transportation pricing elasticity, and predict labor needs in our facilities. Sometimes it means partnering with other companies, as we did with robotics manufacturer GreyOrange, and our plans to introduce 5,000 collaborative robots to warehouses around the world. When we partner, we’re not just looking to license technology. We consider these companies, whether they’re established or startups, a part of our team. We need to understand each other, and they need to help us stay true to our mission. GreyOrange is a perfect example of how such partnerships develop. The “cobots” the company makes will work alongside our employees, taking over the heavy lifting and shrinking the time it takes to fill orders from hours to minutes. Our initial beta testing shows a quadrupling of efficiency while still making our workers’ lives easier—a drastic change several years in the making. Quality Matters As far back as 2015, XPO started evaluating new tech companies with different kinds of products. There were certain emerging trends, certain technologies that had the highest chance of success. One that caught our eye: compact, fully autonomous wheeled robots that can lift and maneuver shelves around a warehouse. A number of companies were coming up with next- generation methodologies to do this, but GreyOrange emerged as our choice. We had our software team study their code to see how we could integrate. Our engineers looked at every part, making sure we agreed with the choices they made throughout the manufacturing process. The more we investigated them, the more we realized their product was far superior to the competition. Last year, XPO was wrapping development on our proprietary warehouse management system. It was the perfect opportunity to integrate the new cobots and make sure the two systems could talk to one another. This was crucial. Because while our software knows what needs to be done—what orders are coming in and who needs to process them—it also has to coordinate packing with the robots by sending them commands to tell them what items to grab and where to move them. Making that happen instantaneously at a very high scale, with tens of thousands of instructions going back and forth, is fairly complex. We also had to optimize our algorithms to include the mobile shelves. When deciding what items should be placed where, you have to consider affinity: What’s the probability of two things being ordered together? And we have a choice of picking station: If three orders have similar items, we’ll send them to the same worker so when that shelf arrives, the worker can fill all three. Better, Faster, Safer Faster turnaround time is a big win for us, but there’s a more important benefit to this sort of collaborative automation: safety. Cobots help us take excess walking out of people’s jobs. It takes out pushing carts and lifting weights, and lets our people focus on creating a great experience for the end consumer.   Like with any new technology or tool, the size and type of your business will dictate how, or even if, you will use these latest advances. Like most things, it’s not a one-size-fits- all situation; however, there’s no argument that change is coming. In some cases, it’s already arrived. Take a moment to look at what’s out there and evaluate if the technology fits your business model and needs. If you see something named Skynet (with Arnold Schwarzenegger as their spokesperson), maybe think twice! Robotics in Operations