Now here we have the new robot that Slantis is using in several of its American plants
This is from SHAP, a Sterling Heights assembly plant, where they make Ram pickup trucks
And the goal here is for this device to manually scan every item on every shelf
And you can see that that takes some work to get to the upper shelf, so it's got this extension
that brings the camera all the way up, and it can recognize everything there
They say that it uses AI, but they say everything uses AI
And what kind of AI it might use to recognize barcodes on packages on shelves, I have no idea
But it is smart enough to handle rearranging the items on the shelves so that the most frequently used items are the most accessible
Which makes sense because if you're constantly getting parts from a shelf, you don't want it to be on the top shelf
That's for the stuff that you get less often, hopefully. So this thing basically solves the problem that I used to have in a job where I worked at a supermarket and we had to be constantly checking the warehouse to make sure that we actually had the items that we thought we did so that we could ship them out to the stores even though the
items seemed to often not be there when the computer said it was. And of course, everybody
has issues with inventories on the shelf and their accuracy. Ours were made worse by the fact
that the people who ran the warehouse were actually stealing supplies from it. That seems unlikely in a
car plant, but people do make mistakes, and this is one way to fix them. Does it make more sense
than having cameras on slides go back and forth? I don't know. It certainly looks cool, and it does
its job. Now, this idea was brought up by a supplier in 2024 when the company invited suppliers
in to the plant to say how can we do things better, how can we do things more accurately
and how can we do things more consistently, which is a good sign because asking suppliers
for their help has generally worked for Chrysler and it should work for Stellantis