At Cooper’s Brewery in Adelaide, the largest family-owned brewing business in Australia, forklifts glide around the sizeable factory floor. With ease, they shelve boxes of lagers and ales. But nobody is at the wheel. In fact, there isn’t a wheel at all. Or a seat. These forklifts are automated guided vehicles (AGVs), a pretty old form of robotics that uses lasers, floor markers or other navigation systems to follow pre-planned paths.
People had always imagined that robots would look like us, but these forklifts hint at a different future — one in which robots are made in the image of the work, not the worker.
