Spyder Web

20

Following the holidays, maintenance technicians had performed a routine diagnostic check on robot 43’s mechanical and electrical systems and found nothing that would have caused the machine to take itself out of service. The robot was a reliable workhorse in the automated factory and had logged very little downtime over its entire service life.Whatever had laid it low that night had, thus far, not reoccurred.

The shipping program, which coordinated customer orders with finished products, sent the materialtransport robots scurrying about the warehouse in search of items ready to ship. The warehouse was always busy following the Christmas-New Year’s holiday, filling orders that customers scheduled for delivery after the first of the year.

Robot 43 glided down the aisleways, finally coming to a stop over the flush stainless-steel sensor pads.From above, an articulating mechanical arm reached down and grasped a small package and placed it on 43’s back. The arm retracted back to the ceiling and robot 43 rolled back into the main aisle and sped to the loading dock.

Six freight trucks sat at the opened bays, quickly being filled with electronics equipment. Though they still personally delivered and installed their large computer systems, Moy Electronics found it more cost-effective to ship smaller, user-installed components via commercial carrier.

The UPS truck at Bay 5 was nearly full when 43 stopped at the end of its run, waiting for the clerk to collect the package from its back. The shipping clerk scanned the package’s bar-coded shipping label with a wand reader. Two seconds later, her handheld computer flashed back a confirmation that this package was to be sent to the Michigan Applied Research Consortium in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Upon receiving confirmation from the dock, the computer logged the package as shipped and ordered robot 43 to return to the warehouse. The clerk took the package over to the UPS driver, who tagged it with their in-transit tracking bar code and loaded it on the truck. Within the hour, the Spyder would be processed at the UPS distribution center and loaded on the next truck to Ann Arbor.