If having flexibility is overkill for the job, then you’re correct, as well as keeping it simpler. But look at Boston Dynamics’s Spot and how many special purpose jobs it has been applied to by many companies. I recently saw a video about some electrical work that’s dangerous and how they worked with BD to train the robot to be able to adapt to situations and remove operators from being there entirely. And there are other companies with their own version of Spot (although they don’t seem to be quite as cutting edge).
If you have a basic warehouse setup and all the things being picked are similar, then a more basic automated picker certainly makes sense. Some places need more than that, so they use humans, or if something comes along that makes more sense than humans (for good or bad reasons) they’ll use the new tech.
If having flexibility is overkill for the job, then you’re correct, as well as keeping it simpler. But look at Boston Dynamics’s Spot and how many special purpose jobs it has been applied to by many companies. I recently saw a video about some electrical work that’s dangerous and how they worked with BD to train the robot to be able to adapt to situations and remove operators from being there entirely. And there are other companies with their own version of Spot (although they don’t seem to be quite as cutting edge).
If you have a basic warehouse setup and all the things being picked are similar, then a more basic automated picker certainly makes sense. Some places need more than that, so they use humans, or if something comes along that makes more sense than humans (for good or bad reasons) they’ll use the new tech.