Stellantis is an automotive manufacturing company that operates 34 assembly plants and other facilities across the United States. One of those facilities is the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Michigan, where Stellantis is using robots to sort warehouse inventory in just 0.5% of the time it used to take human workers. Previously, staff needed 280 hours to account for all of the inventory in the factory’s warehouse division, but a single robot now gets the job done in 90 minutes — approximately 187 times faster.
The robot in question is known as “Dexory V2,” an AI-powered machine that uses a combination of cameras, scanners, and LiDAR sensors to take stock of every item stored in the warehouse, including those sitting on shelves 46 feet high. Dexory is an AI-driven robotics company that deploys autonomous robots as a subscription-based service, and Stellantis is one of its major customers.
Dexory asserts that its autonomous tower robots can scan up to 10,000 pallets per hour with 99.9% location accuracy. It’s an impressive feat of technology that clearly shows why robots are taking over the human labor industry. The real question is whether Dexory’s customers are using these hyper-efficient machines in a way that doesn’t compromise the human workforce.
How Stellantis is using autonomous robots for good
At the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, Stellantis uses Dexory V2 to conduct a full scan of a 36,000-square-foot space in less than an hour. The plant also uses Dexory’s software platform, DexoryView, to gain constant real-time visibility over warehouse inventory and activity. This doesn’t just grant the benefit of efficiency; it also enables Stellantis to make use of techniques like dynamic slotting that just weren’t possible under the slower inventory methods.
This understandably raises concerns about how employment might be impacted at Stellantis. When a company starts using robots to make human workers obsolete, it exacerbates fears that are already reaching a fever pitch in the wake of massive tech layoffs due to AI. However, Stellantis spokesperson Frank Matyok said that no one at Sterling Heights was laid off as a result of this change, and that workers who used to monitor stock in the warehouse have now been reassigned to other duties.
Stellantis does not seem interested in trying to create a dark robot factory completely devoid of people. In fact, Stellantis claims that it will add more than 5,000 new jobs in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana over the next few years. Currently, the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant uses the Dexory robot to sort inventory while 7,000 humans assemble Dodge Ram vehicles for an honest day’s work.
