Robotics would seem to live in an industrial world far from Arkansas’ business aura that centers around poultry farming and production, ranching and rice growing, but that would be wrong. The state boasts robotics leadership in business segments as divergent as logistics and food service. If a robot has not shown up at your restaurant table with a meal in hand just yet, it will.
The drivers behind the effort to integrate robotics into just about everything is easy to see: staffing shortages, cost reduction and workplace safety.
“The obvious one is labor availability and productivity as labor pools have shrunk, especially for big warehouse and manufacturing labor pools, as those have been shrinking over the years,” said Dennis Anderson, chief strategy and innovation officer at ArcBest, an integrated logistics company based in Fort Smith. “Then the cost of that labor has been rising. There’s demand for new ways to get product moved, and consumer demand is not going away, so making sure that we’ve got a way to augment, especially, those labor shortages to decrease the rising cost of labor, [robotics] is one way to do it.”
ArcBest, a 100-year-old company, started life as a local freight hauler and grew into a large national carrier for mostly less-than-truckload freight. It has only been within the last decade that the organization transformed into an integrated logistics company.
Supply chain bottlenecks are a symptom of logistics inefficiency that Anderson cites as the motivation to expand ArcBest’s capabilities in integrated logistics, and, as an offshoot, supply chain pressures pushed the company toward greater innovation in warehouse operations. That effort led the company into the robotics space.
“The robotics piece has emerged in the last two years,” Anderson said. “Really, from a public perspective, we launched our robotics effort publicly earlier this year. What we saw was the need for innovative solutions, particularly in supply chains that were disrupted during the [COVID-19] pandemic.”
A big chunk of that innovation piece are ArcBest’s Vaux Freight Movement System and Vaux Smart Autonomy solutions. Anderson explained the offering this way: “In the forklift world, there’s a 4-kilogram counterbalance lift and a 5-kilogram counterbalance lift, and then reach trucks, [warehouse vehicles that are able to reach into taller or high-bay racking]. Those are the areas we’re really focused on right now in the robotics space, but there’s a safety element to this, as well.”
ArcBest does the upfitting of its Vaux systems to original equipment manufacturer lifts and reach trucks in Fort Smith. The forklifts themselves are manufactured by the OEMs, so whatever forklift manufacturer the customer is working with provides the base equipment. Currently, ArcBest works with select new equipment OEMs, so its systems cannot be retrofitted to existing lifts and reach trucks that a customer already has.
Vaux forklifts and reach trucks can work autonomously, operated by teleoperators using computers located remotely virtually anywhere in the world, or a worker, a human in this case, can hop on the lift or reach truck and override the robotic system and operate it manually.
“Vaux is about leveraging our full suite of innovation. It’s just a completely different way of thinking about loading and unloading trailers,” Anderson said.
The Vaux system was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of 2023.
NOT JUST FOR INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS ANYMORE
Over at Myers Supply in Little Rock and Hot Springs, robotics is focused on service industries — cleaning, scrubbing and moving something like someone’s meal from Point A to Point B.
“We’ve seen since pre-pandemic days, the robot technology getting better and better, and for five years, we studied the market and met with different vendors from around the world just to see what all was out there — and it was really just 18 months ago that it finally got to a point where the technology was there and the price was continuing to drop,” said Ryan Myers, vice president and the third generation of his family working at Myers Supply. “If you look at robots, five years ago, they cost $80,000 to $120,000, and now, depending upon the style, you can get into robotics for as little as $5,000 and get something that will clean hundreds of thousands of square feet a day. The technology is such that [the robots] are equal to or better than a conventional auto scrubber or a vacuum.”
Myers said doing robotics demonstrations at customer locations is still something of a show for people unfamiliar with the technology.
“People are taking pictures because it’s still something new, but we’re just a few years away from robotics being the norm,” he said.
Much of Myers’ business is focused on cleaning, both wet and dry applications. That includes auto scrubbers that put down a cleaning solution and then vacuum the wet surface plus hybrid robots that can do both wet and dry tasks from the same unit.
“Just about all of the robots have their own docking stations or workstations where they autofill, auto dump and auto charge,” Myers said. “Once they’re set up and the mapping is done for a facility, it’s just a matter of setting their schedule, and they will perform their schedule anytime of the day or week and go fill, dump and charge on their own until they’ve completed cleaning their designated area.”
But there is more: Myers supply also offers robots for restaurant, lodging and hospital applications, service segments where staffing shortages can be particularly acute. In those situations, the robots can do anything from hosting or greeting a customer to delivering food or medicine — even busing a table. Running time can be more than 20 hours.
“A service robot would be able to greet and have a little interaction with customers,” Myers said. “Again, they have full [artificial intelligence] capabilities, so you could get as advanced as facial recognition; the robot could recognize and greet people that it’s programmed to meet.”
Setup for a service or cleaning robot is straightforward and relatively quick. With Nvidia AI chips, the robots are self-learning, so even the mapping process that used to be a manual process that required scanning perimeters and virtual walls is no more. Depending upon the type of facility, a restaurant might be a three-hour setup, and a hotel might take a day. With a school or a university where multiple buildings are involved and complex maps are required, it might be a three- or four-day installation. Once that’s done, the units are very much self-sufficient thanks to onboard diagnostics. Using an app or a dashboard, if the robot has a clog or any type of error, it reports to someone responsible for maintaining the unit or a service center. Myers Supply offers remote monitoring if customers want that option and provides lifetime software updates.
Myers was quick to point out that his robotics offering is not meant to replace people on the job.
“Especially on the cleaning side, none of these [robots] are meant to replace people. It is meant to replace a redundant, menial task,” he said. “It makes no sense, at this point, to have a person mopping a floor or vacuuming a floor eight hours a day when this frees up that [human] resource. Everyone has limited staff to really focus on the health of a building, so employees are able to take care of the hotspots and touch points and focus on tasks that are really going to affect the health of the building versus just slinging a mop or a vacuum all day.”
OUT ON THE WAREHOUSE FLOOR
Anderson said there are four areas ArcBest is working to address in its robotics and advanced logistics capabilities: labor availability and productivity, supply chain bottlenecks, safety, and reducing damage and lost product.
As warehouses become larger in both floorspace and volume, the need to prevent product damage and lost product is critical. Being able to handle more warehouse tasks with robots and in concert with some software optimizations has allowed ArcBest, through Vaux systems and equipment, to reduce staging or multiple touches.
“We minimize those touches or handoffs where damages can happen or lost product can happen inside a facility or warehouse,” he said.
Part of the Vaux suite is called “smart autonomy,” which, as the name suggests, allows the robot forklifts to seamlessly work between full autonomous mode and being teleoperated. For example, if the robot is picking up a pallet out of a trailer, the robot might autonomously run to that trailer and, once there, announce that it is available for the teleoperator to pick up the pallet. Once that move happens, the teleoperator completes that task, and then the robot can move autonomously to the next spot where it needs to drop that pallet.
A point of differentiation for ArcBest and Vaux is the system’s flexibility — being able to work in a variety of environments, for sure, but also offering both autonomous equipment and teleoperation in a single suite. Many of the company’s competitors are limited to offering fully autonomous machines or those managed by teleoperators, not both.
“In many cases, shippers or manufacturers are having to choose whether to select a fully autonomous product in the forklift space or select just teleoperations, which is more of an emerging market than even autonomous robots,” Anderson said. “The issue with full autonomy has always been that there are many what we call ‘edge cases’ [tight pathways, for instance], so everything can’t quite be automated just yet. There’s always a progression in what can be autonomously handled, so these robots pick up skills over time regarding what they can do autonomously.”
ArcBest is not just selling its robotic technology out in the marketplace. As a major shipper itself, the company’s warehouses and facilities have become de facto laboratories and showrooms.
“It’s a laboratory, for sure, since there are areas that we don’t necessarily show because it’s a work in progress — ongoing testing of new product and the next advancements within the Vaux suite,” Anderson said, “but at the same time, it does give us a great place to be able to bring customers and show them what these things are capable of and show them in action.”
The company will sometimes take its showroom on the road, mocking up specific areas within a customer facility to demonstrate how the robotics systems will work in the customer’s specific application.
One of the final pieces of the robotics puzzle is how humans working on a manufacturing or warehouse floor interact with the burgeoning technology.
“From what we’ve seen so far, that’s not been a concern,” Anderson said. “Once you see it and you’re around it, it begins to blend into the environment. I mean, one of the things that we’re really focused on is safety first. We want customers to understand the depth of hardening that these systems go through to make sure that they’re safe in a customer environment. Getting a customer comfortable with that is very important from day one.”
If a robot has not delivered your piping-hot food, cleaned your restaurant table, washed the floor of your building or delivered your freight with as little human contact as possible, get ready, because it is probably going to happen. This is not the Hollywood world of scary technology or lofty science fiction; it is about efficiency and doing the repetitive jobs that employees no longer need to undertake while taking some of the safety concerns out of the workplace. If a robot greets you at a hotel by name and serves you a martini upon check-in, it is really more about novelty and customer service than dollars-and-cents efficiency — much more WALL-E than I, Robot.
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