沃尔玛（WMT）多年来一直依赖超过14万名仓库工人来卸货、将托盘货物搬入仓库、在高耸的货架上分类存放商品，然后反向操作将货物送往门店和家庭。
Walmart WMT 0.71%increase; up pointing triangle has relied for years on more than 140,000 warehouse workers to unload trucks, forklift pallets of merchandise into warehouses, sort and store the goods on towering racks, then reverse the entire flow to send them out to stores and homes.
这并不是一项轻松的工作。一名工人每班可能需要走20000步。但这工作本身也不算复杂——除非你试图让机器人来完成它。
It isn’t an easy job. A worker might walk 20,000 steps a shift. It also isn’t all that complicated—unless you try to program robots to do it.
考虑一个看似简单的任务，称为“breakpack”——即从纸箱中取出物品以便单独发货。对沃尔玛的人类工人来说，这不过是小菜一碟。但正是这类任务，成为了公司历时十年、耗资数十亿美元的仓库自动化探索中众多难题之一。
Consider the seemingly simple task called “breakpack”—removing items from cardboard boxes to send out individually. It’s a no-brainer for Walmart’s humans. But it turned into one of the many challenges bedeviling the company’s decadelong, multibillion-dollar quest to automate its warehouses.
沃尔玛及其聘请的机器人公司曾徒劳地寻找让机器人在穿梭于仓库工人之间时，能够将商品分拣入箱的编排方式，测试的技术要么不起作用，要么成本过高。最终，他们设计出了带有运动和障碍物传感器的小型轮式机器人，目前正在十余个仓库中进行安装。
Walmart and the robotics companies it hired to help searched in vain for a way to choreograph robots to sort merchandise into bins while zipping past warehouse workers, testing technology that either didn’t work or cost too much. Eventually, they designed small robots on wheels with motion and obstacle sensors and are now installing them in more than a dozen warehouses.