Next spring our largest depot takes delivery of thirty autonomous mobile robots. They will carry totes between the pick faces and the packing benches, sharing aisles with about a hundred and twenty people on a busy shift. We ran a trial with six of them last winter, and I went into it thinking of them as another fleet of devices., needing wireless, accounts, updates and monitoring.
The trial corrected me in its second week. We moved two access points as part of routine wireless tuning, a change we make most months without telling anybody. The robots rely on the network to receive their routes, and in the aisle where coverage had shifted they began stopping and waiting, which is their safe behaviour. Nobody was hurt. But pickers started stepping round stationary robots into space the robots had been told was theirs, and the depot's health and safety manager asked, reasonably, who had approved a change to the conditions in which moving machinery operates. The honest answer was that nobody had thought of it that way, including me.
I think this is where a good deal of operational IT is heading over the next ten years in companies that move physical goods. Networks, identity, patching and change control have always been about keeping information available and correct. Once software moves heavy objects through spaces where people work, the same activities decide whether that space is safe, and the people responsible for safety have a legitimate say in how we carry them out. Our change process has never asked whether people will be in the room. In a robot aisle that is the first question.
So we are rebuilding some habits before the fleet arrives. Changes that touch the network, firmware or maps in robot zones go through a joint review with the site's health and safety lead, and are made with the zone cleared. The vendor's remote updates are scheduled with us rather than announced to us. Our incident process has a category for a stopped robot with people nearby, and the first responder is the shift supervisor, not my service desk, because the first job is to clear the aisle.
For most of my career a failed change could cost us time, money or data. The trial added people standing next to machinery to that list, and our process had not been written with them in mind.
– Serguey Shinder
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