Self-Driving Cars Are Years Away But Autonomous Forklifts Are Here Already

We are still far away from the day fully autonomous cars become a norm on the streets. The prototypes automobile and tech companies come up with are still making mistakes, and they need a lot of improvement before they can take human passengers.

The automation business is somewhat resembled what we have with AI. They said that the day when they can take the burden off our shoulders are not far, but the more they research, the more obstacles they run into. At the end of the day, scientists have to admit that replicate the functions of a human mind is not an easy task at all.

For now, no self-driving car has been safe enough for a human, but on the contrary, autonomous forklifts are making quite an impressive progress, and as we speak, they have already been a reality and warehouses.

The Challenges Of Autonomous Driving In Warehouses

According to Saurav Agarwal, Stocked Robotics co-founder, and CTO, the most challenging task for self-driving cars is to have the assurance that they are safe. His company specializes in autonomous industrial vehicles, and currently, they are manufacturing forklifts that can operate without having a human onboard.

As AI will be used in sectors like healthcare and transportation, there is nothing more important than safety. Their makers need to ensure that they will not cause harm to human. It is never an easy task training AI to operate a self-driving car. It needs to be fed millions of examples so that it can solve every kind of problems it may run into on the streets.

Autonomous cars run in an open environment where they are exposed to a large number of elements. They should know how to deal with potholes or reckless behaviors of other drivers on the road, not to mention the weather like rain, snow, and storm.

No matter how many examples they run through, there will be a situation in which it does not know what to do. AI has not yet been able to improvise as a human does. It can do math faster than a typical person, but it cannot avoid a truck parking in a weird position.

More importantly, if a self-driving car causes an accident, who will be held accountable for that?

On the contrary, factories are a controllable environment where you can predict most of the possible situations. There will not be a sudden rainfall makes the road slippery, or a person crosses the forklift's path.

According to Agarwal, autonomous forklifts do have their own challenges, but they are easier to manage than those of a self-driving car. He said that it might take at least a decade until you can see an unmanned vehicle running on the streets, but an autonomous forklift is here already.

The Market For Automated Forklifts

On average, one million forklifts join the business in a year, but the most costly expense is for the operator, not the vehicles themselves. A typical forklift operator makes about $50,000 a year. But each vehicle is used by up to three people in a day, so in order to operate one forklift; the business owner must pay about $150,000 yearly.

Another issue here is the environment in a warehouse is not usually suitable for a human. So there is a shortage of human resource to operate these vehicles. But the number of warehouses is increasing fast, putting a strain on business owners to find enough operators.

Stocked Robotics has both hardware and software for automated forklifts, meaning you can purchase them and install on the existing vehicles you are currently having. They can work on a wide range of make and model, so there is no need to change anything in the infrastructure.

The research aiming at giving AI for self-driving car the ability to make sense of their surrounding has conveniently benefited autonomous forklifts. They now have cameras that can help them address objects on their path. This technology, coupled with sensors and lidars, can create a 3D map of the surrounding. This, in turn, gives the forklifts the ability to make it way around obstacles.

For the time being, Stocked Robotics is for the industrial sector only. But in the future, they will expand to road construction, train cargo, and shipping. All of these sectors can benefit from the advancement of AI.

What Happens To Forklift Operators When AI Takes Their Jobs?

If autonomous forklifts make their way to reality, the most obvious advantage is the reduced cost of operating. However, it also means the current operators will likely be made redundant. In the last few years, there has been a lot of fear of a day when automation takes away all of the jobs. And there has been a projection that mass unemployment will happen.

Agarwal has another opinion about this concern. He said that the operators would not sit all the time behind the forklifts, but they will have other tasks to do when that day comes. These vehicles have not been able to operate 100% by themselves without the regulation of a human yet. This is why Stocked Robotics adds a manual mode to their system so that operators can take over if they think a certain task needs to be handled manually.

So for now, AI will be in charge of labor-intensive tasks while an operator will do more demanding ones that call for the intricacy of a human.

Stocked Robotics designs a commanding center where people can sit in comfort and monitor the operation from afar, thus sparing them the need to be in the warehouses by themselves. And what they aim at is a fully-automated facility where human will be in command from another room.

However, even if that does happen, the need for human operators will definitely decease, just like when agriculture machinery takes over, the need for farmers is no longer as much as before the machines are invented.

Another point of view is that if AI can take over all of the hard work, people can sit back doing things like artworks or sports, which require creativity and sophistication.