Warehouse Robots Are a Distributed System

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Tomas Kovacovsky** (0:53)
The optimal peak space is infinity. Yeah.
So, this is a simple answer. But it depends on what kind of objects it is. So, if you would want to pick X, infinity would probably destroy them pretty well. But it comes, it's grocery or it's, I don't know, a rock ball that cannot be broken. But mostly, I would say the speed is still limited by the dexterity of the robot.

**Darin Pope** (1:18)
This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 356
Warehouse robots are a distributed system.
Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darren and Viktor, pretend we know what we're talking about. Most of the time, we mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like Kubernetes, serverless, CICD, team productivity, islands of happiness, and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing. Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there and there is no way we are going to find it. Yes, it's Darren reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Viktor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darren Pope and Viktor Farsic. Viktor, when I say the phrase fleet management, what does that mean to you?

**Viktor Farcic** (2:27)
It means that I need to deal with that CD and I want to run away.

**Darin Pope** (2:31)
Meaning you're probably managing a bunch of EC2 or similar type instances and you're having to blah, blah, blah.

**Viktor Farcic** (2:39)
I thought that CD in terms of fleet of Kubernetes clusters.

**Darin Pope** (2:42)
Oh, fleet of Kubernetes. Exactly. We're used to dealing with it from a software and a deployment perspective, but we don't deal with the physical side of things.
On today's show, we have, deep breath, let's see if I even get it close, Tomas Kovacovsky. Am I close?

**Tomas Kovacovsky** (3:05)
Yes, I think you're pretty close. Yes, it's actually-

**Darin Pope** (3:08)
But I'm wrong. I'm wrong.

**Tomas Kovacovsky** (3:10)
Yes, just slightly here. Okay.

**Darin Pope** (3:13)
He's with Brightpick. He's the CTO and they do robotics, like legitimate robotics, like warehousing robotics, right?

**Tomas Kovacovsky** (3:23)
Yes, that's right. Yeah.

**Viktor Farcic** (3:26)
It's not those types of robots that you can put into your home and then somebody controls it telematically, no?

**Tomas Kovacovsky** (3:34)
No, these are proper, fully autodomous robots. They really do the job. So they're really going around and do the job without someone really needing to control them.

**Viktor Farcic** (3:45)
Yeah.

**Darin Pope** (3:45)
When I said fleet management to Viktor, he said, etc. What does fleet management mean to you in the physical world?

**Tomas Kovacovsky** (3:53)
Yes, exactly. That's for me, it means very different thing. Yeah. So of course I understand also for the software part, but for me, it's mostly really physically managing the fleet robots and in the physical space, like whenever each robot is, whatever it needs to do and basically commanding them around. At the end of the day, it's basically same. So you have more orders, you need to have more robots doing the job, like moving them around.
For me, it's more about the, I would say, the algorithms and also the infrastructure that keeps the warehouse going.

**Darin Pope** (4:28)
What does an algorithm look like? I guess to me, an obvious one, is not having worked in that space ever, is there's got to be vision in there, making sure I'm not running into each other. I guess vision, making sure I'm not running into the racks.

**Tomas Kovacovsky** (4:44)
So basically, you're exactly right. So it depends what kind of automation it is. For example, for our auto-pickers, they are full aware of their surroundings, so they use a lighter navigation. And we have algorithms for navigating around based on the surrounding, based on how the warehouse actually looks. That's just one thing. The second thing, of course, is to understand whenever each robot is around. So we need to go around them.