smith.parker•2mo agoMost Upvoted

I spent 3 full days trying to fix a simple inventory error our new warehouse bot made. A human would have fixed it in 10 minutes.

4 comments

4 Comments

Okay but that "broken logic" is the whole point... it's following rules a human would skip. Like @susansingh's buddy, sure the scanner stopped for a smudge, but that same rule catches a mislabeled box of chemicals or a recalled product. The bot doesn't get tired and decide a pallet "looks close enough." Those twenty minutes of errors are way cheaper than one big lawsuit or a truck getting loaded wrong.

amy_west1mo ago

aaron854's point about "you can see the simple fix right there" really gets at something nobody's talking about though. It's not just that the robot's logic is strict, it's that these systems are usually set up by someone who never has to actually fix that smudge at 3pm on a Thursday. I've seen warehouse leads program a bot to reject anything under a certain weight, but then nobody told it that a half-empty box of packing peanuts isn't a safety hazard. So you end up with twenty minutes of clicking through screens for something that's not even a real problem, it's just bad settings from someone who hasn't touched a box in years.

aaron8542mo ago

Man that sounds like a total nightmare. I've seen those automated systems get stuck on one wrong barcode and just shut down the whole line. The worst part is you can see the simple fix right there, but you have to work through all the robot's broken logic first. Makes you want to just unplug the thing and do it by hand.

susansingh2mo ago

Heard about my buddy at the warehouse last week. His scanner threw a fit over a tiny smudge on a box, flagged it as wrong weight. The whole belt stopped for twenty minutes while he had to click through like ten error screens just to tell the system "yes, this is a box of paper towels, I promise." He said he almost just picked the whole pallet up and walked it across the building himself.