Gap Inc. claims to be the largest specialty apparel company in the U.S., with brands including Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. The company sought to reduce employee turnover and injuries in the physically demanding task of unloading trailers. It turned to the Stretch robot from Boston Dynamics Inc.
“Our facilities go all the way from Ontario, Canada, to Texas and coast to coast, so you could be unloading a trailer in subzero weather, or it could be 105 degrees out,” said Mike Baricevich, senior director of operations engineering and vendor compliance at Gap.
“The fact that Stretch is in there truly supplementing our people and reducing our injury rates is just a huge benefit to us,” he noted. “So instead of the person being in service to the robot, it’s really the robots in service to the person.”
Gap moves a range of items in Gallatin
Gap’s distribution sites include a 1.4 million sq. ft. (130,064 sq. m) facility in Gallatin, Tenn. It moves a variety of boxes containing everything from denim jeans to T-shirts.
The apparel company‘s leaders first saw Stretch at a trade show in 2021 and arranged for a beta test at its distribution center in Fishkill, N.Y.
“We run four basic boxes with supplemental boxes, in addition to vendor boxes, and from Day 1 in the beta, Stretch was able to account for those,” recalled Baricevich. “In fact, we didn’t even know if it would lift the 50-lb. [22.6 kg.] box, and it did it very successfully. It will auto-adjust, so there’s no need for manual intervention.”
“Gap has actually been with us since the beginning,” said Alex Perkins, senior technical director and chief roboticist at Boston Dynamics. “It was the second company to get Stretch in its warehouse, and Gap has been super-engaged in helping us to improve the technology.”
Save now with early bird registration
Stretch automates trailer unloading
Waltham, Mass.-based Boston Dynamics said it has designed Stretch for ease of use. Its base is the size of a standard pallet, and omni-directional wheels allow it to fit into tight spaces.
The robot uses cameras and other sensors to detect and evaluate the stacks of cases in a container. Once it determines which case to lift first, Stretch swings its arm around, grips the case, and swings back to place the case on a conveyor.
Stretch wirelessly communicates with telescopic conveyors so they can move forward or backward in the trailer as needed. Because the unloading system is battery-powered, it requires no compressed air lines or power cables like other robotic systems.
“Stretch runs on its own,” explained Brian Mackenzie, a robotics engineer at Boston Dynamics. “It uses machine learning and its vision to detect all the cases, the ceiling, the walls, the things around that, and then it uses its vacuum gripper to pick up the boxes, place them on the conveyor, and get them inducted into the warehouse. Basically, anywhere in your warehouse a pallet can go, Stretch can also go.”
To keep workers out of harm’s way, Stretch uses lidar to create a virtual perimeter around itself and the container while it’s in motion. If someone crosses into that perimeter, the robot instantly shuts down.
“I think all of our people feel very secure working around it,” said Kevin Kuntz, senior vice president for global logistics fulfillment at Gap. “We haven’t had any incidents with it at all.”
Gap employees get a helper and a break
Gap is an “innovation-friendly organization,” Perkins told Automated Warehouse. “It has some of the heaviest payloads and is conscious of putting strain on workers. Gap is always experimenting with different forms of automation.”
Company managers collaborate with employees when considering new technologies, according to Eric Formanek, senior director of material handling equipment (MHE), engineering maintenance, and capital at Gap. Its team members looked forward to operating a modern robot such as Stretch, he said.
“Our culture at Gap is always open to exploring new ways of working,” said Formanek. “Especially when you engage with our associates, they get to be part of our solution and development. They embrace it. The fact they’re able to go from working in a trailer in the heat and cold to operating modern technology is pretty impressive.”
Boston Dynamics added that its engineers typically spend a week and a half training employees on site. Employees can start driving Stretch around the warehouse and positioning it inside trailers to begin the unloading process in less than an hour.
“One of the awesome things about where robotics has gotten as a whole is the level of intelligence on Stretch,” said Perkins. “Getting Stretch integrated into Gap and getting folks trained up took something like four hours.”
Within two days, employees were certified to operate Stretch on their own with a wired pendant that resembles a video game controller.
“It’s a video game world right now,” said Jimmy Hesson, operations supervisor at the Gallatin site. “Even though I have some tenured associates, they play video games with their children. The learning curve with Stretch was very minimal.”
Once Stretch is in position inside a trailer, operators switch to a touchscreen tablet to run a safety check before hitting play. The starts working, and the employee can walk away.
Employees still spend shifts unloading cases by hand, but the Stretch units give managers greater flexibility with scheduling. Now a skeleton crew can set the robot to unload during extended shifts while associates get time off—even when the warehouse is operating seven days a week during peak seasons.
“The value of Stretch is immense,” said Hesson. “I am able to give my team days off from throwing that they couldn’t typically get.”
Label Sense, Multipick accelerate product flow
Gap has long been a proponent of automation, especially with automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS). One of Stretch’s latest features, called Label Sense, detects labels and turns boxes so that the labels face scanners every time for better downstream ingestion into Gap’s ASRS.
“Label Sense is really important for customers like Gap because of the way they’ve designed their downstream system with their scanners,” said Mackenzie. “If Stretch can place the label on the right side, for example, then all their scanners can read the label correctly.”
Not only can Stretch handle different types of cases, it can also grip ones that are slightly damaged or deformed. Stretch’s Multipick feature allows it to grip several cases at once, as long as their collective surface area isn’t larger than the gripper.
“Stretch’s Multipick feature increases the speed that goods can flow through inbound, so it’s picking up two, three, sometimes four boxes at a time,” said Maddie Pero, another robotics engineer at Boston Dynamics. “The time you shave off by picking that many boxes at once will really speed up how quickly Stretch is running.”
Boston Dynamics helps improve throughput, safety
Gap managers have recognized that Stretch can help with retention and workers’ ability to keep doing certain jobs.
“I also have a very tenured team who has been working inbound for quite a while,” said Hesson. “They recognized that Stretch was going to add to their longevity and how long they could stay in the inbound department.”
In addition, Stretch is helping Gap meet increasing e-commerce demand, which is more labor-intensive to fulfill than bulk shipments to stores. The company said the robotics investment will allow it to keep pace by shifting more workers from inbound to outbound fulfillment.
“Online fulfillment involves about five times more labor than retail fulfillment,” said Kuntz. “In the old days, it took one person to move 1,000 units to a retail location. To move 1,000 units online, I need almost five people to do the same thing in the same timeframe. So automation plays a big part of what we want to do in the future, and we’ve got to plan that years in advance.”
“The feedback goes both ways — we had lots of situations where Stretch would pick up a box and jeans would fall out,” Perkins said. “Gap made sure its suppliers use the appropriate boxes and tape for upstream quality control.”
Gap also wanted to make as much of its inbound process as touch-free as possible. One or two people in the inbound department can now process 10,000 cases in a day—a task that would have taken 12 to 15 people before automation, according to Kuntz. Stretch allows employees to advance to more urgent, and meaningful, work.
“Our employees know that we’re trying to invest in technologies in those really difficult jobs and not expecting them to work those roles all the time,” Kuntz said. “Most people think that you automate just to save money—that’s not necessarily true. Safety is a big reason we want Stretch to unload trailers. We got a lot of positive comments from employees about bringing in technology to solve a real-world problem.”
Stretch has moved a total of over 8.7 million boxes to date. The Gap site in Galletin has already moved more than 1.3 million boxes, and the companies are continuing to roll out systems in Canada and Southern California, said Perkins.
“Not only did Gap pilot Stretch; now it’s also scaling deployments,” he said. “This helps people take us seriously.”
