whirrwork
🌐 Traduction automatique. L'anglais est la source et peut être plus précis. Lire en anglais →

Robot ou humain ?

Warehouse inventory counting

Cycle counter with a scanner and lift vs Autonomous inventory drone (RaaS)

Estimations modélisées par Whirrwork, pas des faits. Méthodologie · Bilan des prévisions

Humain · Par an153 903 $USManual cycle counts
Robot · Par an66 321 $USInventory drone as a service
Délai de retour sur investissement1 mois
Année de basculedéjàBase-case year (earliest to latest across scenarios)

On these numbers the robot option is clearly cheaper.

États-Unis · USD · BLS OEWS May 2025 national medians by SOC occupation

Faites vos propres calculs

Change anything. Results update as you type and stay in your browser; nothing is stored or sent. Works offline after your first visit.

Charge de travail
Hypothèse

Pallet locations counted per month (e.g. 15,000 locations twice).

Hypothèse

Hours per day the drone may fly.

Hypothèse

Days per month.

Hypothèse

Months per year.

Personnel
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

BLS OEWS May 2025 national median hourly wage, SOC 53-7065.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Wages and salaries were 70.0% of total employer compensation cost for private industry workers in June 2026 (ECEC), so total cost = wage / 0.70.

ilostat.ilo.org

Nominal 4.4% a year, 2015-2025 (ILOSTAT hourly earnings).

Hypothèse

Locations per person-hour with an order picker or reach truck for high bays.

Hypothèse

Lift truck cost per counter-hour. Default 0 ignores it.

Robot
Hypothèse

Locations per drone-hour.

Calculé Actel Robotics progressivelogistics.com

Corvus One small-DC quotes $2,500-$4,500/month; Langham reported about $4,000/month per Gather AI drone.

Hypothèse

WMS integration and site setup.

Hypothèse

Contract years.

Hypothèse

Availability (charging).

Hypothèse

Work lost to faults.

Hypothèse

Locations that still need a person (unreadable labels, exceptions to resolve).

Hypothèse

Staff minutes per drone-hour.

Hypothèse

kWh per drone-hour.

Hypothèse

Electricity price per kWh (USD). Check your bill; energy is rarely a big line.

Finances
Hypothèse

Annual financing / discount rate. Nobody publishes yours; 8% is a round mid-2026 commercial borrowing guess.

Hypothèse

Years in the NPV comparison.

Hypothèse

Share of a human service price that is labour (rises with wages). Used to escalate and to adjust US service prices to other countries.

Hypothèse

Share of a robot service price that is labour (pilot, technician). The rest is equipment, which learning curves make cheaper.

Hypothèse

Share of a lease or RaaS fee that pays for hardware (learns down). The rest is service and support (moves with wages).

Download these results (CSV)

Résultats

OptionPar moisPar anPer unit (location)Coût initialDélai de retour sur investissementBreak-even utilisation5-year NPV vs baseline
Humain Manual cycle counts Référence 12 825 $US153 903 $US0,428 $US— — — —
Robot Inventory drone as a service 5 527 $US66 321 $US0,184 $US5 000 $US 0.7 mois 21 %
Utilisation 64 %
 408 189 $US

What moves the answer most

Each bar shows the 5-year NPV of the best robot option when one input moves to the low or high end of its range, with the rest held at your values.

5-year NPV vs baseline: Inventory drone as a service5-year NPV vs baseline: Inventory drone as a serviceWorkloadlow value: 5000 → -79 981 $UShigh value: 150000 → 2 233 558 $USHuman output per hourlow value: 30 → 1 006 597 $UShigh value: 120 → 108 985 $USHourly wagelow value: 14.36 → 290 975 $UShigh value: 21.54 → 525 403 $USRobot output per hourlow value: 80 → 224 545 $UShigh value: 300 → 414 491 $USHuman equipment cost per hourlow value: 0 → 408 189 $UShigh value: 8 → 578 312 $USWork that stays humanlow value: 0.05 → 440 733 $UShigh value: 0.3 → 278 010 $USEmployer on-cost multiplierlow value: 1.2790000000000001 → 346 670 $UShigh value: 1.579 → 469 708 $USSubscription per robot per mo…low value: 2500 → 457 507 $UShigh value: 4500 → 358 870 $USFinancing and discount ratelow value: 0.05 → 440 556 $UShigh value: 0.12 → 369 841 $US408 189 $US0low valuehigh valueSource: Whirrwork Robot-or-Human model v1.0.0 (whirrwork.com/tools/robot-vs-human/inventory-scanning/). Modelled estimate, not a fact.

Cost per unit to 2035

Real terms (today's money). Robot hardware follows Wright's law; wages follow each country's history. Shaded band: robots-slow to robots-fast scenarios. Estimations modélisées par Whirrwork, pas des faits.

ChartCoût humain par unité (Base), Coût robot par unité (Base), Coût robot par unité (Robots : progrès rapide), Coût robot par unité (Robots : progrès lent). Source: Whirrwork Robot-or-Human model v1.0.0 (whirrwork.com/tools/robot-vs-human/inventory-scanning/). Modelled estimate, not a fact.0,00 $US0,10 $US0,20 $US0,30 $US0,40 $US2026202720282029203020312032203320342035USD / locationscenario rangeCoût humain par unité (Base)Coût robot par unité (Base)Coût robot par unité (Robots : pr…Coût robot par unité (Robots : pr…Source: Whirrwork Robot-or-Human model v1.0.0 (whirrwork.com/tools/robot-vs-human/inventory-scanning/). Modelled estima…

Année de bascule: déjà

What the spreadsheet misses

Sécurité
Fewer people raised on lifts to read labels at height.
Qualité
More frequent counts; accuracy depends on labels.
Flexibilité
People also fix the discrepancies they find.
Edge cases
Blocked aisles, shrink-wrap glare and missing labels.
Customer experience
Fewer stockouts from phantom inventory.
Jobs and redeployment
Walmart dropped shelf-scanning robots in 2020 partly because staff could do the checks during other work: count what your people already do.
Réglementation
Indoor flight is usually unregulated; workplace safety rules apply.

Voir aussi

Sources de cette page

Les notes et les sources sont en anglais ; la version anglaise fait foi.

  1. Corvus One inventory drone, small distribution centre (<150,000 sq ft): about $2,500-$4,500 per month RaaS Actel Robotics, 2026 · vendor
  2. Langham Logistics pays about $4,000 per month per Gather AI inventory drone Indianapolis Business Journal via Progressive Logistics, 2026-10
  3. Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 (median hourly wage by occupation) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025-05
  4. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026: wages and salaries 70.0% of private-industry compensation (series CMU2020000000000P) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026-06
  5. Mean nominal hourly earnings of employees by sex and occupation (ISCO-08), DF_EAR_EHRA_SEX_OCU_CUR_NB ILOSTAT (International Labour Organization), from national labour force and earnings surveys, 2025
  6. Labour cost levels by NACE Rev. 2 activity (lc_lci_lev): Germany 2022-2025, total labour cost vs wages and salaries per hour Eurostat, 2025
  7. Rates and thresholds for employers 2025 to 2026 (employer Class 1 NIC 15% above £5,000) HM Revenue & Customs, 2025-04-06
  8. 令和6年賃金構造基本統計調査 (Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2024), table 1 by occupation Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan (via e-Stat), 2024-06
  9. Average monthly earnings of employees by sex and economic activity, DF_EAR_EMTA_SEX_ECO_CUR_NB ILOSTAT (International Labour Organization), 2022
  10. Average annual wage of employed persons in urban units in 2024 (by position and by region) National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2025-05-20
  11. Euro foreign exchange reference rates (cross rates to USD), via Frankfurter European Central Bank, 2026-10-23
  12. Wright, T. P. (1936). Factors affecting the cost of airplanes. Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, 3(4), 122-128 Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, 1936
  13. Nagy, B., Farmer, J. D., Bui, Q. M., & Trancik, J. E. (2013). Statistical basis for predicting technological progress. PLoS ONE, 8(2), e52669 (62 technologies; Wright's law among the best hindcasters; errors grow with horizon) PLoS ONE, 2013