The Army wants to roboticize forklifts

Add forklift operator to the list of jobs that might soon fall to machines. The Army Applications Laboratory is working on a way to convert just about any human-driven forklift to autonomous operation. 

“When you think about a potential future conflict and the amount of supplies that are going to have to flow from the [United States] and allied partners to places forward, it’s going to be immense,” Casey Perley, executive director of the Army Applications Laboratory, said this week during a Defense One Genius Machines broadcast. “One of the things we’re looking at is autonomy for forklifts. So essentially, how can they work in pairs where one forklift loads the other; they both go to where you’re dropping it off, you drop it off, you go back for more.”

A few companies sell autonomous forklifts, but Perley said what the Army really needs is a way to convert the ones it already has. “This type of technology is designed to not be, like, vendor- or model-specific on the forklift; it’s designed to work with multiple types of systems. So the idea being: you invest in the AI and the autonomy versus a whole lot of hardware, and then you can just take that AI and autonomy and put it on different systems.”

The lab has hired a company called TracksNA to develop the self-operating forklift software. In late October, soldiers and engineers will get together to run forklifts through their paces. Such “touchpoints” are critical to building the brains for robotic forklifts, she said. It’s not like autonomous vehicles on streets which can all access similar data repositories. The training of robot forklifts requires a lot of interaction with human operators. 

“The more of these [touchpoint opportunities] you get in the Army, and the more [repetitions] that our soldiers can get with them, the more we’re going to learn the types of experiences we are going to need to train these forklifts, the type of data that we’re going to need to ensure is fed into the models. So that is why soldier touchpoints are so critically important, is it really teaches us the type of stuff we’re going to need to teach the vehicles.”