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