Companies Hire 'Robot Wranglers' --- Automatons wander and get 'lost like a child'

"Caroline Rutenberg got an alert one day that one of her charges needed help at the Amazon.com warehouse where she works in Windsor, Conn.

Rutenberg walked across the warehouse floor and found the crew member covered in white paint and refusing to move after an accidental spill.

Rutenberg took a cloth and gently wiped off the worker's eyes, getting a glassy, expressionless stare in return. But it's not like she expected a "thank you" -- her underling is a robot, a squat machine on wheels that looks like a Roomba vacuum with a conveyor belt on top.

Androids of various shapes, sizes and functions are now employed doing everything from autonomously ferrying goods around warehouses to delivering food on college campuses. 

About 21% of warehouses used some form of robotics in 2023, up from 15% in 2018, according to research firm Interact Analysis.

But far from replacing humans entirely, companies are finding automatons need a little hand-holding to learn how to function in the real world.

Rutenberg, a robot technician and trainer at Amazon, is among a new class of workers responsible for corralling and managing the robots, fixing minor maintenance issues and keeping tabs on their locations. 

The professionals say the machines they work with tend to perform their tasks with precision but often also a little naivete.

Some devices get a reputation, Rutenberg said. One autonomous robot she works with -- a device called a drive that she named Blinky for the lights it flashes when it needs help -- has become known for its misbehavior.

When a robotic arm tries to set an item down on Blinky's conveyor belt, Blinky will move its belt too quickly and bungle the transfer, she said. People recognize Blinky on sight because it zooms around faster than the other bots.

"Everyone knows the drive number of it, and people are like, 'Oh s -- , not again. It's him again,'" Rutenberg said. "We kind of give them a little personality." Blinky couldn't be reached for comment.

Scott Samples is known as the "robot wrangler" at an appliance-manufacturing plant run by Roper, a subsidiary of GE Appliances, in LaFayette, Ga. Workers call Samples when a robot wanders off its designated path.

"I'll either get a text with a picture or I'll get a phone call and they'll say, 'Hey, your robot's over here on such and such line, can you come get it?'" he said.

The 25 robots at Roper work on tasks such as delivering parts and materials to the assembly line and moving finished products. They are programmed to follow a digital map of the facility and to use camera vision and light detection and ranging technology to stay on course. But occasionally they stray out of bounds, where they can no longer locate themselves on the digital map, shut down and wait for help.

"We've found them on a receiving dock, just lost like a child in the park," Samples said. Other times the automatons are "over by somebody's desk or trying to get under their desk," he said.

When Samples gets a call about a robot wandering off, he pulls up that particular bot on his computer and looks out of the cameras and sensors attached to the device to try to figure out where the android is within the 1.4 million-square-foot facility. He then goes out, manually finds the robot and guides it back inside its boundaries.

Samples said the facility's human workers give the robots names, including Wonder Woman, and generally get along with their automated counterparts. But sometimes there are standoffs between humans and machines.

The robots "make a decision if something's in the way, they'll go around it, but so will a person," he said. That can lead to the robot and a person both trying to move out of each other's way at the same time but repeatedly crossing into one another's paths. That's when workers will tell Samples, "This thing is following me and will not let me by," he said.

Robot wranglers say part of their job is to help employees see robots as a help rather than a hindrance or a threat.

Sean Cusack, a robot engineer in Oakland, Calif., said conveying that message often isn't hard. "People envision robots as these completely intelligent, Terminator-level things," he said. In reality, "they're pretty silly," he said.

Jaci Story says the robots can have a mind of their own. The operations lead at San Francisco-based Starship Technologies works with a fleet of robots on the University of Tennessee campus.

One morning, Story was lifting up a robot to plug in the charger underneath.

"As I was doing that, one of them just kind of made this crazy sounding scream. And then it said, 'Whoa, whoa, we have rights you know,'" she said. "I just died laughing."

Just like with humans, the robot minders say some androids are less capable workers than others. At times the devices have to go on performance improvement plans to address problem behaviors.

Roper's Samples said he currently has a robot with an undiagnosed issue that he and the team that handles engineering maintenance work can't figure out. The device, named Apex 2, is calling for a part replacement, but even now that the part has been replaced, it still won't run.

"Even the tech can't figure out what's wrong with it," he said. "We've had to replace him with a spare for right now."" [1]

1. Companies Hire 'Robot Wranglers' --- Automatons wander and get 'lost like a child'. Young, Liz.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 31 Jan 2024: A.1.