As far as I can see, boxes are picked up from one side, or the top. Some boxes would collapse due to this uneven distribution of force - a human worker would normally pick up a box from both sides, or the bottom.
Humans are only expected to be able to life 50lbs, you can go a little heavier, but it is no longer a weight that you can safely expect anyone to lift. You need to hire for strength to go above 50lbs. At 75lbs two humans are required to work as a team to lift for safety reasons (weight lifters can go beyond 600lbs alone, but not workers). I'm not sure where the next cutoff is, you soon need mechanical help to move anything.
Weight lifters can go beyond 50+ lbs, safely, only if the weight is basically in barbell (or dumbbell, or whatever) format. A large 100lb box isn't being lifted by any smart weightlifter alone.
The World's Strongest Man format contains a number of events that are probably a lot closer to real workplace lifting tasks than barbell events are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Strongest_Man#Compet... . Though of course those full competition weights are very much an upper bound and wouldn't be viable as everyday one-man lifts even if you hired elite strongmen to be your warehouse operatives.
OTOH 73kg (160lb) full beer kegs still get a fair bit of one-man manhandling, and to be a proper professional scaffolder you have to be able to lift a full-length scaffolding pole (just under 30kg, apparently?) from flat off the ground to straight up above your head, partly one-handed in one smooth movement, several times a day routinely.
Hopefully no one that handles beer kegs for a living is lifting full ones. They have special dollies for handling beer kegs, they even have special attachments for fork lifts for picking them up. I've never been to a brewery where anyone was picking up beer kegs by themselves.
You've also never been to a bar where the owner is too cheap to buy one of those dollies. Or rather you have, but you've just never been to the back of the bar where a porter is lifting those full gets up and down a rickety set of stairs.
as the person below commented strongmen train for the "atlas stones" event which involves lifting (arguably more difficult) spheres weighing from 50 to 339 pounds and placing them atop a shelf. there are also plenty of people that do "tire flips" (myself being one such person) where you lift and flip tires ranging from ~100lbs to >500lbs (and i'm not some kind of 99 percentile lifter).
Realistically, any company investing in one of these robots is going to make sure it's right for their workflow and that they're using boxes capable of being lifted this way.
Would that happen before or after that company already sunk money on one of these robots?
Most boxes are designed to withstand inward pressures, not necessarily outward. And those specs are based on a lot more thorough of testing than "well we tried it a couple times and it didn't break, so I guess we're good"; I'd need to see one of these handling a lot of boxes without issue before I'd throw it into a warehouse.
Now I'm wondering if it would actually make sense in some settings to fill the place with water and use waterproof containers that match the density of water. You could move stuff in 3D with small submarine robots.
I took a tour of the Celestial Seasonings tea company in Boulder, Colorado many years ago and they had a robot arm for loading pallets very much like this one, except it was fixed to the floor. It had the same suction type mechanism and would grab boxes off a conveyer and stack them on pallets to be shipped out. It was very efficient at it's job and definitely was the highlight of the tour for me, even if it wasn't intended to be. Boxes full of tea are not very heavy, but certainly weigh more than an empty box. The point being is the suction mechanism for picking up boxes has been around for a long time (20+ years?), is tried and tested, and in this very article claims it can handle boxes of up to 50 pounds.
If you've got boxes full of lead, there's not much to be done other than redesign everything from the start. But for a box that's moderately heavy - you use more suction cups, increase the vacuum, change the arm path to make the motion smoother, use a coated cardboard to improve the suction cup seal, or other tricks.
This looks like evolution of Boston Dynamic's 'Handle'. This URL which ends with 'handle' now redirects to an URL which ends with 'stretch': https://www.bostondynamics.com/handle
In 2019 BD released their updated Handle robots which used swinging counterbalance tail to lift warehouse boxes. Looked very dangerous to be around them; this 'Stretch' version seems to have been tamed much.
They went around the actual hand-like manipulators to lift boxes from the top & bottom edges like human hands would but with vacuum suckers.
Almost reminds me of the last DARPA challenge for humanoid robots where KAIST cheated with a robot which simply rolled from one place to another & did super slow stairs one leg at a time, which was exactly what the competition was supposed to overcome.
I think he's saying the spirit of the competition was failed because it took over 1 minute per step which if this was a consumer or commercial product...would have been a failure. 4 steps look like it took 5+ minutes. Hard to tell because they sped up the footage 20X to make it look reasonable.
Did that robot just jerk the plug from the wall by pulling the cord rather than the plug itself? That's such a no-no. Even though there's no actual plug, but what else was that supposed to simulate?
Presumably the test designers designed it in a way hoping that if something can pass test X, then it must also be able to do Y, making it a good test of Y abilities. Then someone comes along and figures out how to pass the test without being able to do Y.
You see it all the time in ML stuff. "Only a true AI could X" (with an implicit "and that would imply Y") and then people figure out how to build a system that does X but doesn't imply Y.
Turns out it's amazingly hard to build good standardize tests that don't fall into "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Seems like it places great trust in the structural integrity of the packaging/box. BD claims it can "grab and move" boxes up to 23 kgs.
I've done some work in Mech Engg. designing grippers for smaller objects, and gripping objects is often the hardest part. From an operations research perspective, a human will figure out the best way to carry a box that is almost falling apart almost intuitively.
I can see this being extremely useful in, say, a large warehouse where it is isolated to finding and moving boxes to loading bays, particularly through an API.
Wow, I have vastly underestimated Amazon's technological lead. I worked in a non-Amazon warehouse many moons ago, and they weren't doing anything even in the same atmosphere as this.
For warehouses willing to make capital investments automating the process of getting bins to pickers is a pretty well understood problem. Getting boxes out of trucks like Boston Dynamics is doing here and getting items out of bins and into boxes like we[1] are doing are the frontiers of warehouse automation right now.
The number of robots and their speed are really impressive. But the concept is not so new. I saw robots driving around with parts at a car manufacturer in 1991 or 1992.
yikes , i can imagine it would be hard working in that 'sub' level in the building with only those florescent lights, having robots 'dump' their packages down a shoot onto you. maybe workers only stay there for 6-18 months before moving on to other areas of building (or new job)
They're both indoors. There isn't natural light in the robot section either. What's the difference? It'd be about the same as being in any big box store other than it sound like like someone roller skating up above.
In the comments on that video, there are Amazon workers saying most of this stuff is still manual. I've read some workers on reddit saying it varies a lot from warehouse to warehouse.
The problem is that building the entire warehouse to support automation from day 1 requires a lot of upfront costs that only the largest orgs can reasonably afford. And it's remarkably easy to screw up, such that the automation doesn't end up being all that effective or itself introduces inefficiencies. It ain't like software, either, where it's (comparatively) easy to refactor things; if you fuck up an automation project, it's gonna be stuck that way for years.
Besides, in my experience (as a professional in this exact field of warehouse / supply chain / fulfillment operations), the biggest gains are usually process-related, and adding robots doesn't really help. The average warehouse tends to have ridiculously inefficient processes, driven by clunky and cumbersome software. Things like aisle zoning / pick path planning (i.e. minimizing the distances pickers have to travel for average pick orders, and minimizing contention between pickers and replen), data entry automation (e.g. barcode scanners and computerized scales instead of manual data entry), precise and measured use of conveyors, etc. help maximize the return on every labor dollar spent. These things can all be done incrementally to good effect.
That is, to your point: throwing robots at an inefficient warehouse just gets you an inefficient warehouse full of robots. And yes, designing the warehouse from the ground up to support automation as efficiently as possible is a good idea, but focusing on human efficiency will get you 90% of the way there - and then you can spend the other 90% of that effort on whiz-bang software and droids ;)
The clerks at the warehouse I worked at spent 30 min-1 hour every day hand-collating order manifests because whatever system that spit them out (from some contractor or corporate?) did so as PDFs that couldn't be easily modified. Literally building packets that were similarly structured, every night, by hand.
I did what I could with Excel macros to automate as much as I could, but I'm not a trained coder and I definitely didn't have security access to implement the tools that could have saved us huge headaches. I wondered quite a bit who the hell up top got paid to set up this process.
Yep, sounds like a classic case of an ERP or order management system throwing documents over the wall because "well all the data's there, so the warehouse can figure it out". And as for "who got paid", probably some COBOL programmer who retired decades ago and is now living the dream entirely offline in a beach house in Costa Rica.
Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.
PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded.
I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format.
There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it.
My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.
Well, now you have to pay for building the warehouse, and hope that the tech it's built around doesn't become outmoded before the upfront costs are made back + profit.
What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway? So it falls apart further down the stream?
This is similar to a situation we often deal in electronics repair business. Some people are very adamant about being careful when reworking around water damaged components because those solder joints/balls/legs are already weakened, when in fact the proper procedure is to rip out and replace everything compromised. Whats the point of turning device back to working electrical order while leaving it mechanically deteriorated - it will come back broken the first time used bumps into something, or when the eaten away solder ball finally gives up after few more heat cycles.
Any time someone would say "be careful or it falls apart" its time to remove/replace it, not pass along hoping to make it someone elses problem.
> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?
I'd imagine the goal ("purpose") is to meet a sweet spot between money spent on packaging materials and cost of returns from broken deliveries caused by the packaging.
Sometimes less money spent on packaging also aligns with corporate environmental goals. If you're into loyal customers you probably want to spend a little more than you "have to" one packaging.
I'd say if Amazon adopts this kind of robot for their warehouses they won't worry about investing a bit more into reliable packaging. It's still going to be cheaper than paying a monthly salary.
> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?
UPS sometimes breaks boxes they deliver. They just re-tape it and finish delivery. Sometimes everything is there, sometimes something is lost and you need to file a claim.
This robot at least needs to recognize broken box and hail human in such case.
Much like running a large storage array and dealing with cosmic ray bit-flips and dead drives I wonder how many truck crashes, forklift incidents and train derailments UPS deals with on a given day. I bet their ticket queue is interesting.
Can you imagine triaging a train derailment and not setting it to the highest priority?
Interesting. The only damaged deliveries I’ve ever received happened when someone sent me something fragile via Canada Post. It seems that when it arrived at the post office, they carefully took the broken box and all the leaked-out bits, put the whole assemblage into another, larger box, printed a new shipping label for the larger box, and shipped it on. So I received a clean, sturdy outer box, containing some detritus and a redundantly-labelled inner box, in turn containing the rest of my shipment. (I assume, if something in the inner box had been a liquid and leaked out through the box, they’d have put the whole inner box in a plastic bag before putting that in a box.)
Making that the general approach would probably solve the automation problem pretty cleanly. You could even have broken-package-packaging robots at each cargo-unloading step!
AngelSoft toilet paper comes in big cardboard case packs that have a diagonal perforation so that the top half-ish can be torn off and the case set on a self as a sort of display. No one does that with AngelSoft because the boxes are ugly but you see it with other things.
The problem here is that the perforations will easily tear under the weight of a full case so it's extremely common for it to give out if you try to pick it up by the top.
but who cares if the case makes it to the store in one piece because we only care about the packs inside.
Agreed re: loading, but it's still important to be able to carry that disintegrating box to a pack station to be repacked. Usually you can't do that on the spot, since having a box strewn about on the warehouse floor is a pretty big safety hazard.
> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?
Sometimes you're unloading or on the receiving end of disintegrating boxes, and you need to unload the container the freight came in. This is to receive in the damaged product to your warehouse before you can claim it.
Two examples I from bring on the receiving end:
- ocean freight were water gets in through holes / damaged parts of the container that cause all the packaging material to breakdown
- beverages being punctured or otherwise leaking causing all packaging material to be damaged
In an ideal state, you don't have damaged packaging because you can use clamps, slips, or other specially designed conveyance equipment.
Not to mention some boxes might not work with griping. That was my first reaction when I saw it. I have also yet to see any robot that is designed for -20C / -4F warehouse which are in dying need of automation. Current form are at best per rack or per pallet automation.
The video also shows the dog robot, each time I see it I imagine there are versions with machine guns on their backs and get anxious, I would stop showing the dogs ones in the unrelated PR materials.
Are there such drones without human remote control?
What would help at least me is to see this dogs actually used for something useful where they are the best solution, what I mean used in production not demos - because I can't imagine that many scenarios where are a good solution over a drone or a robot with wheels.
Yes. Definitely. autonomous flying air craft are not new. much easier compared to anything moving on the ground. object and path detections is arguably less likely to fail being less contact with terrain.
>Are there such drones without human remote control?
To be realistic. Spot (the dog) is not autonomous currently either. In fact it doesn't even use "AI", all of its movements are electrical and mechanical control theory on steroids ;)
The BD customer can integrate an AI to direct movements if desired but it's not what BD ships. BD instead offers a human operated remote control with camera system.
Why do you think so? A drone has to be piloted the whole time, while a dog can be positioned and stay there with no further piloting or energy requirement. I also imagine that piloting a drone around hissing gas and in low vision could be problematic.
So if SpaceX needs video of the landing/crash sites then you could buy a few drones instead of a single dog. Because of possible debris and fire on the ground I also expect a drone would be better, and if teh land is clear then a drone could also be configured to land and film from the ground(because you could afford multiple ones you can have different configurations).
I might be missing something though, a scenario where an robot with legs can do better then a flying or wheeled one.
Take any quadcopter, attach high explosives to it, ram them into people and blow them up. While you are at it, throw on a cheap raspberry pi with some simple machine learned computer vision to target humans.
There, I made you afraid of cheap $100 quadcopters off Amazon and raspberry Pis.
True, but there are like 1 billion more real world examples where this devices are used in production, so if you see a drone on the sky you think that is probably some kid with his toy, if you see the dog robot what scenario are you imagining ? (assume you are not on a big city with a university)
as someone who was into building quadcopters in the DIY drones community since somewhere around 2009, I can tell you that the majority of people who had the opportunity to see me flying my quadcopter (in the far-from-society rural wilderness, by the way) during the early days routinely bothered me about the danger of having such a large flying object, and whether or not I knew if anyone like me was placing weapons on-board.
Now you can buy larger quad-copters than I had built off the shelf.
Things change , people get used to it, opinions morph.
When robotic dogs and bipeds become more common place, people will become less threatened by them just due to sheer anxiety fatigue, if not more friendly reasons.
My take : when I see a robotic dog I think "That's a corporation with a spending budget!"
I would like to see Myth Busters like video trying this versus other methods (probably is not legal though). If the target is a bit suspicious then i can't see them waiting for a drone to land on their head before it detonates. From I read on news still idiots with guns commit more terrorist attacks. My intuition is that we will see robot dogs with machine guns mass shootings rather then AI drone dropping a grenade.
In Syria and Iraq quadrotors with bombs were used pretty extensively, first by ISIL and then later by the Iraqi state. They were used to target small groups of infantry and vehicles [0].
In another case, small CoTS RC planes did significant damage to a Russian airbase in Syria [1].
This big drones also make me anxious, the difference they did not popup on HN or my Youtube, the only drones I seen before today were the ones used for filming. So yeah an AI controlled large done with face recognition and machine guns also gives me chills, I am thinking that at this moment some military dudes are creating strategies to combine the dogs and drones to create a "police" force somewhere.
You don't need a machine gun. If you are using computer aiming and stabilization at close distances, it would almost never miss. A suppressed tube of subsonic .22lr would be quiet, accurate, and very light.
I recall videos of quadcopters dropping grenades and mortar rounds (for accuracy - they can drop one within a trench or at the door of a trench-shelter, unlike firing a mortar from distance) as improvised weapons a few years ago in the Ukraine Donbass conflict.
More advanced "loitering munitions" (essentially, drones that fly around until they're sent to slam into a target) were used in the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
I believe that all these cases were human-in-the-loop for various reasons, but the possibility for automated targeting seems reachable soon if the armies would really want it (which is not certain).
I can't deny what you say is true but something about the Dog and Mule robots is very creepy and disturbing on a deep, visceral level that I don't get from quadcopters.
> [Boston Dynamics] warned that if the "spectacle" goes ahead, Spot's warranty might be voided, meaning it could not be updated.
Wait, so they reserve the right to void your warranty if you use their product to make art?
I remember there was a case where a company bricked someone's device because they left a bad review[0], but having companies judge the artistic merit of their customers' use cases seems somehow even more dystopian.
I'm torn on that scenario. They do not feel fear or worry about self preservation. There is no such thing as "I thought he had a gun and felt threatened."
I could see plenty of "I thought he had a gun" scenarios, we're just chopping off the "...and felt threatened" part. Unless the robot accompanies a group of humans and decides they are threatened by the situation. It becomes "I thought he had a gun and decided the humans with me or around me were threatened". Maybe these robots could be outfitted to coat a person in immobilizing goo or something rather than filling them full of holes. Or long range tasers. Or tranq darts.
I wonder how much Amazon is investing in automated robots for their warehouses, and whether unionization has encouraged them to invest more. Not to be glib, but I could imagine Jeff Bezos saying “no man, no problem“
You'll just get more and more people believing all work is exploitation and they'll stop working. Then the people still working will have higher taxes, feel that they're being exploited by the people not working, and soon everybody will be unemployed and nobody will be exploited and it'll be paradise.
Quite the unsupported fantasy you've put forward - sounds similar to the argument that once people have enough money they'll stop working, so better pay them only enough to survive - until you include billionaires into the equation, who don't stop working when they have enough to live for 1,000s of years.
Right, billionaires will do whatever they can to earn more, including leaving a country with high tax rates.
But a lot of people if guaranteed a minimal quality of living would just stop working and do things that they like (that don't necessarily make money) and that's the whole point of UBI.
Doing things that they like would still be working. They just don’t have to engage in rat race jobs anymore. They can have the dignity a billionaire has.
Almost yes, except wages for the stuff that needs to be done will rise to the point that you actually earn almost what your labor is worth :-) some of the most important jobs in the world (nurses?!) pay much less than my hobby of sitting in front of a computer and making pretty plots. That's fucked up
> You'll just get more and more people believing all work is exploitation and they'll stop working.
Which means less labor supply, which means higher labor prices, which means greater incentive for people to work (since wages would no longer be suppressed by the "either I take this predatory offer or I starve to death" effect).
> Then the people still working will have higher taxes
Not necessarily. That depends on who and what you tax. A land value tax + a tax on income or wealth after a certain point (say, $1m/year) would readily pay for UBI without putting any tax burden on the working class. The other benefits of LVT (like incentivizing denser urbanization and penalizing land speculation) are nice cherries on top.
>Which means less labor supply, which means higher labor prices...
...which means higher prices of good and services, which means that the basic income you had previously settled on is no longer sufficient to survive on. How sure are we that there's a stable equilibrium?
Only if automation never happens. Clearly that ain't the case, per this very comment section and the topic thereof.
Indeed, automation's going to continue anyway, because as automation costs fall they'll eventually undercut labor costs - even those artifically suppressed through coercive means, as is currently the case in any (capitalist or otherwise) society lacking a socioeconomic safety net like UBI. So sooner or later something like UBI is necessary either way (that, or making people do pointless busy work, which is both paternalistic and grossly inefficient).
The better remuneration and conditions the workers have, the more expensive they are, and the more there's an incentive to invest into capital replacing labor so that you have more machines and fewer workers.
There are many things that could be automated right now (for example, in the garments industry) but are not because it's currently cheaper to do them in a third world country by poorly paid workers - but the moment those workers would have to be properly paid, the tasks would go away as then it would be cheaper to automate.
Then those tasks absolutely need to be automated. If you can't even pay living wages in a poorer country then this isn't a task that humans should perform.
It didn't happen with industrial revolution, I doubt it will happen now. Robots will not replace plumbers, waiters, teachers, barbers - at least not in the nearest future.
Just because a human is doing a repetitive job it does not justify having them urinate in bottles and defecating in bags at their stations to reduce the crucial time they take away from their primary job function.
Chefs do “robotic jobs” repeatedly creating the same end product. Would you be comfortable if the person who prepared your Michelin course dinner was forced to urinate in a bottle while they did it? Why are we ok with treating human beings like this, simply because we do not romanticize the task of sorting and moving boxes.
i'm not the one making accusational claims. if i were the one making claims, i'd offer some sort of backing materials. otherwise, let's just all start making stuff up
It's not an accusational claim. It's a joke about a popular game. This is not an insane discourse on the nature of evidence, it's simply a reference you weren't familiar with.
Eventually they will need a solution which can grip boxes more like a human (especially being able to adjust grip to handle boxes that begin to deform).
This one-side suction system will obviously fail if the box itself cannot hold its contents without ripping or deforming.
I would rather see the robot get better than we start using bigger boxes with lighter loads just to make it easier for the robots. I already receive too-big boxes and too much paper packing stuffing.
You don’t need bigger last-mile boxes. They could just “wrap” each item (or many items of the same SKU) in a reusable transport bin for its lifetime in the warehouse; move the bins themselves around; and then pick the items out of the bin (or invert the bin right over a final shipping box) when they leave.
This is almost inevitable. The current situation is designed for humans. The boxes generally hold together; the number that fail either structurally (deformed) or catastrophically (contents destroyed) is probably within some tolerance. Deformed boxes cost basically nothing with humans.
These robots appear to have a gentler touch than what I'm guessing humans do, based on the health of the cardboard I receive from humans. They might make it feasible to create re-usable plastic boxes that have some kind of an anchor point.
I've got a friend that works in the field and have seen their machines in operation and how they work on their contracts. The use cases right now seem to be entirely human defined; i.e. it handles items that weren't modified to make it easier on the robot, and it handles items in a random orientation. Could be turned, could be upside down, could be balanced on a corner against another item.
If robots take over more of the pipeline, you can start guaranteeing that boxes are oriented correctly, which gives you a lot more practical options than "cover it in hooks, and we'll worry about how to stack it later". Space in containers is also a big concern, so anything that increases the size of a good is generally bad (last-mile delivery excepted).
Presumably we'll see (or not see, but it will happen) improvements in all steps of the process of packing, sending, and delivering goods. This is a... good thing.
And perhaps with more automation and logistics improvements, reusable last-mile containers can become common. We already receive our one of our grocery deliveries in foldable crates which get re-used (one set always sitting empty at home, and traded to the delivery driver for crates with new groceries).
So we'll have to tax the companies to pay for the UBI. The company's choice: pay wages to humans, or pay for robots plus UBI for people not working. Which is cheaper?
Shifting to robots is unlikely to put the burden for paying for those people entirely on the one corporation. It’ll be spread out across all taxpayers. It’s a tragedy of the commons (that may not actually be tragic).
I had a weird dream about the matrix, as if the fact that this movie was made didn't save us from becoming plugged bodies into the virtual world .. instead it's sadly becoming the most plausible future.
I think if you could get it down to the price of a car it would make sense for a lot of households.
Families are really busy, and meal prep/cleanup takes a lot of time.
Why does everything have to be as cost effective as possile?
I'd much rather have robots in my kitchen and my garden that grow fresh vegetables on my soil, adapted to my preferences, and turn them into dishes that match my taste,
than the end-product of a ginormous industrial farming machine.
60-70% of the worlds food supply comes from family farmers,
yet most pesticide and fertiliser usage is in industrial farming.
Factory farming is only cheaper because artificial fertiliser is so cheap, but if you look at the "costs" on the entire system/ecosystem it's a lot more expensive.
If you only view food as a source of nutrition and energy, then this might seem reasonable, but it completely ignores the socio-cultural aspects of cooking.
Having a robot in your kitchen allows you to share in the work, to learn from it, and teach it.
Maybe you cut the tomatoes while it peels the onions.
Or you start cooking, and it finishes for you.
Maybe you cook your lunch, but because you want to wake to the smell of freshly baked croissant, the robot does it.
There is an infinite spectrum of interaction, learning, and joy that could come from this, that goes beyond merely eating the prepared dish.
Maybe small restaurants in the style of old Japanese eating houses combined with community gardens would be a good middle ground though, but having industrial take-out everyday sounds like a dystopia to me.
We are halfway there, Samsung afaik presented a cooking robot this CES
While the open source community is working on home farming robots [1]
[1] https://farm.bot/
Happy to see this mentioned. It has been considered as a project for a spare large outdoor area in my SF home! (good project to get the nephews excited about growing their own food as well)
Given how many suction cups there are, it seems like it would distribute the lifting force across the top of the box pretty evenly. Like the inverse of the 'bed of nails' phenomena.
Lots of comments about the limitations of the suction grabber, but I wonder if anyone here has an educated guess as to how far we are from the robotic hand dexterity needed for near human-level manipulation of relatively simple objects like boxes. I know it's a notoriously hard problem that sci-fi has always underestimated the difficulty of. It seems like while we might near human-level precision for tasks which don't require speed||torque||low cost (robotic surgery being an example of such an unconstrained problem), the minimum viability for a factory floor robot seems pretty high: cheaper than a low-wage human, factoring in both up-front capital cost plus operating cost per box moved per hour. So realistically, you can't sell a robot with human-level accuracy and reliability for $200k with additional operational and maintainance costs on top of that.
You still might be able to. There are a lot of considerations for having humans around that robots don't need. Bathrooms, HR, qualms about unemployment, bad PR from treating warehouse workers poorly, parking spaces, aisle space to allow humans to pass each other, etc, etc.
A huge part of the gains come from completely eliminating humans, and getting rid of all the niceties that come with human labor. I strongly suspect that it will come down to the opex to maintain the robots than the capex to buy them. If opex is lower than hiring humans, companies will buy in. You can get tax breaks on the capex for the robots as you devalue them. Robots also shield your opex (right now), because nobody is clamoring that the robots should get paid more. Your labor costs for humans could double at any point; even $15/hr isn't keeping pace with inflation if you look back to the 50's or 60's.
> Lots of comments about the limitations of the suction grabber, but I wonder if anyone here has an educated guess as to how far we are from the robotic hand dexterity needed for near human-level manipulation of relatively simple objects like boxes.
We already have have the means to do human-level manipulation like that, it just doesn't use a hand. I have a buddy that works in the space and have seen their robots go. If you want your box up on it's side, the robot will do that for you.
I don't think we're likely to see a big push towards human hands. Hands are great generalist manipulators, and are good when you don't know what kind of stuff you'll have to handle. That doesn't really apply to robots, though. There are almost always more specialized designs that are cheaper to make, cheaper to repair, and better at handling the item in question.
Just thinking about boxes, for example, a forklift seems infinitely better at handling boxes with potentially weak bottoms than a human is. Our hands cannot support the full length of the box.
Looking at surgery, almost the entire point of human hands is to manipulate tools which were designed to be manipulated by human hands. Just attach the tool directly to an arm on a platform that can spin and angle itself like a wrist. No need for overly-complex fingers that might drop a scalpel on someone's face.
I don't see human hands being a useful design for a robot until we get general artificial intelligence. If I can ask the robot to go perform a novel task, then it makes sense to equip it in a way that it can handle any kind of generic object. Until then, the robot was designed for a purpose, and it makes sense to choose specialized manipulators.
Pretty poor stacking. Probably could be met half way with better boxes. Some perforated holes in corners like intermodal containers with a rubber membrane outside for seals. QR / reference prints for better alignment.
You have to appreciate that we have some of the top minds of the world working on revolutionary technology with the ultimate aim of making a huge group of our population unemployed so the richest man in the world richer. And naturally this receives government funding.
I know this is of cause done because it’s an easy target for robotics, and proves a value stream. But you still have to wonder just how big of a societal change we could achieve if these efforts where target at empowering and improving the lives of the masses instead of removing the “annoyance” of having to pay minimum wage workers as part of the costs of huge insanely profitable corporations.
Are you a subsistance farmer? If not then your job exists because of automation. Every single product that exists exists because we have automated away something is the past. Every book, tv show, pop song has been produced by people who in previous generations would have had to spend their days hunting and gathering. Automation frees up people to innovate. What's sad is that we still have people who spend their whole lives doing jobs that could easily be done by robots.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUuWWnfRsk
As far as I can see, boxes are picked up from one side, or the top. Some boxes would collapse due to this uneven distribution of force - a human worker would normally pick up a box from both sides, or the bottom.
OTOH 73kg (160lb) full beer kegs still get a fair bit of one-man manhandling, and to be a proper professional scaffolder you have to be able to lift a full-length scaffolding pole (just under 30kg, apparently?) from flat off the ground to straight up above your head, partly one-handed in one smooth movement, several times a day routinely.
Realistically, any company investing in one of these robots is going to make sure it's right for their workflow and that they're using boxes capable of being lifted this way.
Most boxes are designed to withstand inward pressures, not necessarily outward. And those specs are based on a lot more thorough of testing than "well we tried it a couple times and it didn't break, so I guess we're good"; I'd need to see one of these handling a lot of boxes without issue before I'd throw it into a warehouse.
In 2019 BD released their updated Handle robots which used swinging counterbalance tail to lift warehouse boxes. Looked very dangerous to be around them; this 'Stretch' version seems to have been tamed much.
APR2019 Handle: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...
Almost reminds me of the last DARPA challenge for humanoid robots where KAIST cheated with a robot which simply rolled from one place to another & did super slow stairs one leg at a time, which was exactly what the competition was supposed to overcome.
Can you explain more about how they "cheated"? it looks like they were awarded 1st prize.
You see it all the time in ML stuff. "Only a true AI could X" (with an implicit "and that would imply Y") and then people figure out how to build a system that does X but doesn't imply Y.
Turns out it's amazingly hard to build good standardize tests that don't fall into "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
I've done some work in Mech Engg. designing grippers for smaller objects, and gripping objects is often the hardest part. From an operations research perspective, a human will figure out the best way to carry a box that is almost falling apart almost intuitively.
I can see this being extremely useful in, say, a large warehouse where it is isolated to finding and moving boxes to loading bays, particularly through an API.
Amazon is already doing this, and this video is highly relevant here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sEVX4mPuto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_storage_and_retrieva...
For warehouses willing to make capital investments automating the process of getting bins to pickers is a pretty well understood problem. Getting boxes out of trucks like Boston Dynamics is doing here and getting items out of bins and into boxes like we[1] are doing are the frontiers of warehouse automation right now.
[1] http://www.righthandrobotics.com/
Flipkart (India's Amazon, acquired by Walmart since then) deployed similar things in their warehouse: https://inc42.com/buzz/flipkart-deploys-100-automated-robots...
Yet another warehouse robotics startup from India: https://www.greyorange.com/
Stay strong factory workers!
But at this point they aren't the only company making that style of inventory/robot system now. There are a few clones out there in use.
Does anyone know the cost?
Besides, in my experience (as a professional in this exact field of warehouse / supply chain / fulfillment operations), the biggest gains are usually process-related, and adding robots doesn't really help. The average warehouse tends to have ridiculously inefficient processes, driven by clunky and cumbersome software. Things like aisle zoning / pick path planning (i.e. minimizing the distances pickers have to travel for average pick orders, and minimizing contention between pickers and replen), data entry automation (e.g. barcode scanners and computerized scales instead of manual data entry), precise and measured use of conveyors, etc. help maximize the return on every labor dollar spent. These things can all be done incrementally to good effect.
That is, to your point: throwing robots at an inefficient warehouse just gets you an inefficient warehouse full of robots. And yes, designing the warehouse from the ground up to support automation as efficiently as possible is a good idea, but focusing on human efficiency will get you 90% of the way there - and then you can spend the other 90% of that effort on whiz-bang software and droids ;)
I did what I could with Excel macros to automate as much as I could, but I'm not a trained coder and I definitely didn't have security access to implement the tools that could have saved us huge headaches. I wondered quite a bit who the hell up top got paid to set up this process.
Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.
I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format.
There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it.
My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.
This is similar to a situation we often deal in electronics repair business. Some people are very adamant about being careful when reworking around water damaged components because those solder joints/balls/legs are already weakened, when in fact the proper procedure is to rip out and replace everything compromised. Whats the point of turning device back to working electrical order while leaving it mechanically deteriorated - it will come back broken the first time used bumps into something, or when the eaten away solder ball finally gives up after few more heat cycles.
Any time someone would say "be careful or it falls apart" its time to remove/replace it, not pass along hoping to make it someone elses problem.
I'd imagine the goal ("purpose") is to meet a sweet spot between money spent on packaging materials and cost of returns from broken deliveries caused by the packaging.
Sometimes less money spent on packaging also aligns with corporate environmental goals. If you're into loyal customers you probably want to spend a little more than you "have to" one packaging.
UPS sometimes breaks boxes they deliver. They just re-tape it and finish delivery. Sometimes everything is there, sometimes something is lost and you need to file a claim.
This robot at least needs to recognize broken box and hail human in such case.
"Package destroyed, contents discarded." (it was a piece of furniture with a glass component).
and
"Package delayed due to train derailment."
Can you imagine triaging a train derailment and not setting it to the highest priority?
Making that the general approach would probably solve the automation problem pretty cleanly. You could even have broken-package-packaging robots at each cargo-unloading step!
The problem here is that the perforations will easily tear under the weight of a full case so it's extremely common for it to give out if you try to pick it up by the top.
but who cares if the case makes it to the store in one piece because we only care about the packs inside.
Sometimes you're unloading or on the receiving end of disintegrating boxes, and you need to unload the container the freight came in. This is to receive in the damaged product to your warehouse before you can claim it.
Two examples I from bring on the receiving end: - ocean freight were water gets in through holes / damaged parts of the container that cause all the packaging material to breakdown - beverages being punctured or otherwise leaking causing all packaging material to be damaged
In an ideal state, you don't have damaged packaging because you can use clamps, slips, or other specially designed conveyance equipment.
What would help at least me is to see this dogs actually used for something useful where they are the best solution, what I mean used in production not demos - because I can't imagine that many scenarios where are a good solution over a drone or a robot with wheels.
To be realistic. Spot (the dog) is not autonomous currently either. In fact it doesn't even use "AI", all of its movements are electrical and mechanical control theory on steroids ;)
The BD customer can integrate an AI to direct movements if desired but it's not what BD ships. BD instead offers a human operated remote control with camera system.
I might be missing something though, a scenario where an robot with legs can do better then a flying or wheeled one.
There, I made you afraid of cheap $100 quadcopters off Amazon and raspberry Pis.
Now you can buy larger quad-copters than I had built off the shelf.
Things change , people get used to it, opinions morph.
When robotic dogs and bipeds become more common place, people will become less threatened by them just due to sheer anxiety fatigue, if not more friendly reasons.
My take : when I see a robotic dog I think "That's a corporation with a spending budget!"
In another case, small CoTS RC planes did significant damage to a Russian airbase in Syria [1].
[0]: Death From Above: The Drone Bombs of the Caliphate https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/02/10/death-drone-...
[1]: Russia Offers New Details About Syrian Mass Drone Attack, Now Implies Ukrainian Connection https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17595/russia-offers-ne...
More advanced "loitering munitions" (essentially, drones that fly around until they're sent to slam into a target) were used in the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
I believe that all these cases were human-in-the-loop for various reasons, but the possibility for automated targeting seems reachable soon if the armies would really want it (which is not certain).
That's considered reasonably effective by the militaries, and fully within the capabilities of many cheap quadcopters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56182268
Wait, so they reserve the right to void your warranty if you use their product to make art?
I remember there was a case where a company bricked someone's device because they left a bad review[0], but having companies judge the artistic merit of their customers' use cases seems somehow even more dystopian.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/iot-company-bricks-cust...
That actually sounds even more awesome :)
To realize what people are going to do when they don't have to work, look at those in retirement: gardening, choir singing, lotto may be?
But a lot of people if guaranteed a minimal quality of living would just stop working and do things that they like (that don't necessarily make money) and that's the whole point of UBI.
Which means less labor supply, which means higher labor prices, which means greater incentive for people to work (since wages would no longer be suppressed by the "either I take this predatory offer or I starve to death" effect).
> Then the people still working will have higher taxes
Not necessarily. That depends on who and what you tax. A land value tax + a tax on income or wealth after a certain point (say, $1m/year) would readily pay for UBI without putting any tax burden on the working class. The other benefits of LVT (like incentivizing denser urbanization and penalizing land speculation) are nice cherries on top.
...which means higher prices of good and services, which means that the basic income you had previously settled on is no longer sufficient to survive on. How sure are we that there's a stable equilibrium?
Only if automation never happens. Clearly that ain't the case, per this very comment section and the topic thereof.
Indeed, automation's going to continue anyway, because as automation costs fall they'll eventually undercut labor costs - even those artifically suppressed through coercive means, as is currently the case in any (capitalist or otherwise) society lacking a socioeconomic safety net like UBI. So sooner or later something like UBI is necessary either way (that, or making people do pointless busy work, which is both paternalistic and grossly inefficient).
There are many things that could be automated right now (for example, in the garments industry) but are not because it's currently cheaper to do them in a third world country by poorly paid workers - but the moment those workers would have to be properly paid, the tasks would go away as then it would be cheaper to automate.
Modern American safety net is far from perfect, but it does a pretty good job making sure people don't die from hunger not freeze to death.
Chefs do “robotic jobs” repeatedly creating the same end product. Would you be comfortable if the person who prepared your Michelin course dinner was forced to urinate in a bottle while they did it? Why are we ok with treating human beings like this, simply because we do not romanticize the task of sorting and moving boxes.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABDLuHlNjHE
This one-side suction system will obviously fail if the box itself cannot hold its contents without ripping or deforming.
I would rather see the robot get better than we start using bigger boxes with lighter loads just to make it easier for the robots. I already receive too-big boxes and too much paper packing stuffing.
These robots appear to have a gentler touch than what I'm guessing humans do, based on the health of the cardboard I receive from humans. They might make it feasible to create re-usable plastic boxes that have some kind of an anchor point.
I've got a friend that works in the field and have seen their machines in operation and how they work on their contracts. The use cases right now seem to be entirely human defined; i.e. it handles items that weren't modified to make it easier on the robot, and it handles items in a random orientation. Could be turned, could be upside down, could be balanced on a corner against another item.
If robots take over more of the pipeline, you can start guaranteeing that boxes are oriented correctly, which gives you a lot more practical options than "cover it in hooks, and we'll worry about how to stack it later". Space in containers is also a big concern, so anything that increases the size of a good is generally bad (last-mile delivery excepted).
And perhaps with more automation and logistics improvements, reusable last-mile containers can become common. We already receive our one of our grocery deliveries in foldable crates which get re-used (one set always sitting empty at home, and traded to the delivery driver for crates with new groceries).
There's a lot of room for improvement here.
1- Decide what you want made and how you want it made (by choosing ingredients and cooking methods from a UI)
2- Place your order
3- Automated Restaurant queues your custom order, picks ingredients, cooks according to your preferences, and packs it
4. Drone (or human) delivers it rapidly, while still warm
Better to fill a big warehouse-size restaurant with robots than to fill a million kitchens with robots.
I'd much rather have robots in my kitchen and my garden that grow fresh vegetables on my soil, adapted to my preferences, and turn them into dishes that match my taste, than the end-product of a ginormous industrial farming machine.
60-70% of the worlds food supply comes from family farmers, yet most pesticide and fertiliser usage is in industrial farming. Factory farming is only cheaper because artificial fertiliser is so cheap, but if you look at the "costs" on the entire system/ecosystem it's a lot more expensive.
If you only view food as a source of nutrition and energy, then this might seem reasonable, but it completely ignores the socio-cultural aspects of cooking.
Having a robot in your kitchen allows you to share in the work, to learn from it, and teach it. Maybe you cut the tomatoes while it peels the onions. Or you start cooking, and it finishes for you. Maybe you cook your lunch, but because you want to wake to the smell of freshly baked croissant, the robot does it.
There is an infinite spectrum of interaction, learning, and joy that could come from this, that goes beyond merely eating the prepared dish.
Maybe small restaurants in the style of old Japanese eating houses combined with community gardens would be a good middle ground though, but having industrial take-out everyday sounds like a dystopia to me.
Still missing the ingredient prep though.
Stretch from Boston Dynamics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523 - March 2021 (62 comments)
"its mobile base means it can slot into spaces designed for humans"
Sounds like there would be the temptation to have it running near humans. It looks pretty heavy and powerful.
A huge part of the gains come from completely eliminating humans, and getting rid of all the niceties that come with human labor. I strongly suspect that it will come down to the opex to maintain the robots than the capex to buy them. If opex is lower than hiring humans, companies will buy in. You can get tax breaks on the capex for the robots as you devalue them. Robots also shield your opex (right now), because nobody is clamoring that the robots should get paid more. Your labor costs for humans could double at any point; even $15/hr isn't keeping pace with inflation if you look back to the 50's or 60's.
> Lots of comments about the limitations of the suction grabber, but I wonder if anyone here has an educated guess as to how far we are from the robotic hand dexterity needed for near human-level manipulation of relatively simple objects like boxes.
We already have have the means to do human-level manipulation like that, it just doesn't use a hand. I have a buddy that works in the space and have seen their robots go. If you want your box up on it's side, the robot will do that for you.
I don't think we're likely to see a big push towards human hands. Hands are great generalist manipulators, and are good when you don't know what kind of stuff you'll have to handle. That doesn't really apply to robots, though. There are almost always more specialized designs that are cheaper to make, cheaper to repair, and better at handling the item in question.
Just thinking about boxes, for example, a forklift seems infinitely better at handling boxes with potentially weak bottoms than a human is. Our hands cannot support the full length of the box.
Looking at surgery, almost the entire point of human hands is to manipulate tools which were designed to be manipulated by human hands. Just attach the tool directly to an arm on a platform that can spin and angle itself like a wrist. No need for overly-complex fingers that might drop a scalpel on someone's face.
I don't see human hands being a useful design for a robot until we get general artificial intelligence. If I can ask the robot to go perform a novel task, then it makes sense to equip it in a way that it can handle any kind of generic object. Until then, the robot was designed for a purpose, and it makes sense to choose specialized manipulators.
I know this is of cause done because it’s an easy target for robotics, and proves a value stream. But you still have to wonder just how big of a societal change we could achieve if these efforts where target at empowering and improving the lives of the masses instead of removing the “annoyance” of having to pay minimum wage workers as part of the costs of huge insanely profitable corporations.