Tag Archives: robotics

Inside an Amazon Fulfilment Centre

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Amazon LTN4 in Dunstable

On Bank Holiday Monday my family and I visited our local Amazon fulfilment centre for a factory tour. It was an eye into the future of robotic automation, and an opportunity to see how something as traditional warehouse stock picking can be reinvented from the ground up.

We visited LTN4, which is in Dunstable (near Luton, Hertfordshire) in the UK. Amazon fulfilment centres are named after their nearest airport codes (Luton airport is less than 10 miles away), and we visited the 4th building on the industrial estate.

From the moment you arrive at the car park, safety is a priority. There are signs every few metres instructing drivers to reverse into spaces.

Inside the warehouse, there are safety signs everywhere. The second priority is security. Employees and visitors need to leave everything except keys, wallet and phone in a locker. There are hundreds of lockers for the 1,200 permanent staff. And there’s even an Amazon locker in the reception area. There are airport-style metal detectors which all staff need to pass through on the way in and out of the warehouse.

Once on the tour, we watched the stock fillers, stock pickers, and two sets of packing teams – for customers who ordered a single item, and on the opposite side of the warehouse, pickers for customers with multiple items. We weren’t allowed to take any photos during the tour, except in the room below. Continue reading Inside an Amazon Fulfilment Centre →

This person REALLY does not exist

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Keep looking at the image and repeating “This person doesn’t exist.”

ThisPersonDoesNotExist is my favourite site of the year so far. It’s mesmerising.

Each time you look at the site, it generates a face from a very clever Machine Learning algorithm. And the algorithm, well the learning, only gets better with time.

The more you look at the site, you then start wondering:

  1. If the facial components on ThisPersonDoesNotExist are from real people, who owns those parts? (E.g. my chin)
  2. If the faces on ThisPersonDoesNotExist are indistinguishable from real-life portraits, how much longer before we are looking at other computer-generated artefacts? Newspaper articles written by robot journalists and TV robot news anchors have already been done.
  3. When will we started reading fictional news items, totally fabricated from non-real photos and facts? How will we certify real things?
  4. What’s next?

The three waves of robotic automation

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We are currently between the second and third waves of robotic automation. For the first two, we underestimated how it would affect us. For the next wave, its importance can’t be underestimated again.

Wave one: physical labour

The first wave was physical automation. If you asked a car factory worker in say, the 1960s, “What is the fastest time a car can be assembled?” their answer would probably have been in the several days, maybe hours. Continue reading The three waves of robotic automation →