Englisch BHS, Maturatraining mit Audio-CD

38 Reading Working with robots Read the text about an Amazon warehouse. Complete the sentences (1–8) using a maximum of four words. Write your answers in the spaces provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. 15 Working with robots Trenton, New Jersey isn’t the industrial power- house it once was, but a few minutes east of the town, inside a warehouse belonging to Amazon, there are signs of another industrial transforma- tion. Located in the township of Robbinsville is Amazon’s ful–lment centre, where orders are processed and dispatched. It is a hive of activity, with humans and machines working in carefully coordinated harmony. Besides showing the incredible eŒciencies of Amazon’s operations, the factory hints at how, over the coming decades, technology may start to assist human workers with many simple manual tasks. At the centre of the warehouse is a storage space containing square shelves packed with countless products from Amazon’s inventory. Previously, Amazon’s workers would have roamed these shelves searching for the products needed to ful–l each new order. Now the shelves themselves glide quickly across the £oor carried on robots about the size and shape of footstools. In a carefully choreographed dance, these robots either rearrange the shelves in neatly packed rows or bring them over to human workers, who stack them with new products or retrieve the goods for packaging. Amazon’s robotic shelves allow more products to be packed into a tighter space. ey make stacking and picking more eŒcient than having humans walk around, so it is also a good example of how automation can be combined with human labour to increase productivity. “ ey’re pretty quick and eŒcient,” says Emily Specca, who works on the picking line in the Robbinsville plant. But she says the robots some- times malfunction, slowing her down, and she confesses that she’d probably quite like to be able to move about once in a while. For many decades, industrial robots were con–ned to performing extremely precise and repetitive tasks and were separated from human workers. In recent years, however, thanks to better computer chips, algorithms, sensors and actuators, robots have become cheaper, safer and better able to learn new tasks quickly. Amazon’s robots are controlled by a central computer and navigate using markers on the ground. Amazon has begun exploring ways it might someday automate some of the shelf- picking work at its factories. However, robots are still incapable of tasks that require –ne manipula- tion or improvisation, so it is useful to devise ways for robots to collaborate with humans more e†ectively. e big hope is that robots will become easier to drop into factory and distribution settings and easier to integrate with existing manual processes and workers. But beyond the robotic shelves, humans work in close collaboration with automation across Amazon’s warehouse. Products £ow through the warehouse at a dizzying pace, tracked from arrival to dispatch. At the start of the process, a sophisticated computer vision system recognizes products a er they are unpacked. On the other side of the warehouse, workers pack products into boxes for shipping with help from Amazon’s central computer systems. Items retrieved from storage shelves are automatically identi–ed and sorted into batches destined for a single customer. e computer knows the dimensions of each product and will automati- cally allocate the right box and even the right amount of packing tape. Further along, before products are sent to di†erent trucks for dispatch- ing, boxes are weighed to make sure no mistakes have been made in packing. e robot revolution means greater capacity eŒciency for Amazon, quicker delivery for customers and fewer blisters for the feet of pick- ers, who no longer have to walk the equivalent of two marathons a week. e company says that embracing robotics allows it to improve customer service. Whether its customers will have jobs in future to pay for internet shopping remains to be seen. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv