Supervised autonomy

ERIK NIEVES is a self-confessed ‘robot guy’ but he concedes that it isn’t about the robots at all, it’s about the software.

“I was at Yaskawa for many years, including working as head of R&D, where I was tasked to help diversify the company away from automotive.

“It became apparent that every vertical outside manufacturing had higher variability, which means perception, you have to discover every cycle, you can’t just assume. It also means the rate of change in the process is much greater than you ever see in manufacturing.

“I’m a robot guy but we are absolutely a software company. In the warehouse space, it’s all about vision, which means it’s all about software. So I left Yaskawa to go build the software, with co-founders from the vision space, in 2016.”

Once you realise that AI is the differentiator then people actually become critical, says Erik.

“Our software is AI-enabled, but we’re also the first ones to tell you that AI is going to occasionally disappoint you. It will encounter a scene it does not understand, for example, a new item, or an occluded item.”

Erik continues: “We fundamentally believe you need a human in the loop. The ‘PlusOne’ is a person.

“Our two products: PickOne (handling product); and Yonder (allowing remote management of the robots) are not separate thoughts.”

PlusOne's AI uses confidence thresholds, when the robot parses the scene and its conclusions are below the confidence threshold, it ‘phones a friend over the cloud’.

The robot operator, or ‘crew chief’, in Texas, supervises many robots across the globe and senses exactly what the robot senses. The operator sees the robot is confused and instructs it on the correct pick. This is then tagged by the crew chief and used to feed the machine learning model.

“This is important,” says Erik. “For AI, you need data and the data needs to be tagged. What we have essentially done at PlusOne is develop an elegant way to feed exceptions in real time into the model, so hopefully the crew chief doesn’t have to deal with this exception again.”

Crossing one billion picks in February 2024, PlusOne has multiple UK sites in the fuflilment sector handling parcels in outbound processes. It is also targeting robotic applications of mixed pallet depalletisation.

“We’re over-spec if you have uniform pallets, but if you have mixed cases on a pallet, then you have a similar problem as parcels, a cluttered pile, so we use our vision and gripping technology to select products and move them to a downstream process. An example could be an RDC taking mixed pallets from the NDC, and breaking them down to build store bound pallets.

“The competition here is manual and if you work here your work day is not measured in hours, it is measured in tonnes. I thought the problem was reaching for the case at the top of the pallet, it’s not, it’s bending down for the last case at the bottom!”

“The benefits of automating for the customer are labour savings and avoiding claims. The reason for choosing PlusOne is speed – our software is very good at enabling the robot to pick multiple packages at once.”

Check out a day in the life of a crew chief here –