For those of you who don't work in the warehouse logistics space ProMat, which is to warehouses as CES is to home gadgets, is coming up in a couple of weeks so expect lots of warehouse robotics companies to continue making announcements.
The roboticization of manufacturing is mostly finished since factories work with identical outpus SKUs every time. Warehouses tend to have to handle a lot of different SKU but in a fairly regular way meaning that they're an environment that's pretty much ripe for robots to be entering just now. Goods to picker systems (like Kiva) have really taken off allowing robotic pickers like the one sold by us a nice ecological niche to fill. There are also companies with robotic forklifts and all sorts of other things.
I'm not entirely certain that the role these bots are performing wouldn't be better served by a large stationary robotic arm, as some other companies are working on now. It might very well be the best solution for unloading trucks?
On the stationary arm question it is a question of warehouse logistics. Warehouses are cheap (essentially a simple box over a concrete pad) and they they get reconfigured all the time. A robot that can set up where ever you have dropped a bunch of metal shelving, and then move to a new place, keeps your operational costs down.
That is an awesome solution! Everyone already has a forklift in the warehouse. Do you worry about the torque moment for extension? Clearly one can do the whole push a weight out in the opposite direction like cranes do, but I could see that interfering with turning depending on layout.
We mostly work with consumer goods that'll easily fit in one hand so that hasn't been a big problem for us. In our new video for ProMat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i0dsQfPCY) </shamelessselfpromotion> you can see the sorts of things we pick. When people wander by our booth we encourage them to throw in their wallet or shoe or such to let the robot pick it. Not their briefcase.
Can humans work nearby? For example, is it sufficient that the pallet it sits on is bright orange & has warning signs to stay 3 feet away, or do you need something more elaborate?
In most setups we use collaborative arms from Universal Robots so that people can work right next to the robot. It makes development easier too. Our system does work with industrial arms that require those sorts of precautions, though.
Right, but how about a stationary arm mounted on the back of a pickup truck? Or something. It does seem like a lot of the hard work here (balancing, not running out of space to zig-zag...) isn't obviously needed for the task.
That swinging counterweight is a major hazard, and negates the idea of having a small foot print due to 2 wheels... But then I remembered this is probably designed to impress non-engineers, and has nothing to do with safety, or efficiency.
In addition to "Assume good faith," I think HN should have a rule that goes something like, "Assume people aren't complete idiots." Call it a hunch, but I'm going to guess that the people who build this thing understand how to use a simple IR sensor to tell if a human or animal larger than a typical warehouse rat approaches within several meters.
If you take a tour of a factory with industrial robots there will be black and yellow tape on the floor or some other equivalent way of warning:
Do not step inside this perimeter or you may die.
If a 200kg robot arm gives you a love tap because you were just barely in the perimeter you may not survive.
We’ll fix it in post is ok for film production. Move fast and break things is ok in free to consumer services or SaaS where 0.99 uptime is great. It is not ok with industrial automation.
True, for the task shown. That for me is the rub. As an engineering problem I'm looking at it like "The robot cost $x, operating it costs $y, and setting it up to operate costs $z." So I want to make sure that the costs add up to (ideally) less than an operator or two.
Optimization is about what can you assume is "fixed" about the environment (and so not engineer a solution around it) and what must you consider "variable". Clearly fixed constraints are easier to engineer around, and if all of your pallets and racks were arranged similarly, then a robot you could move somewhere, have it extend its "base" to provide stability, and then run all day would be a win.
The other variable then is how often do I do this task from this space. Assuming setup and tear down of the robot takes some number of minutes/hours, those add as a cost to change tasks. If the robot is mobile and can move itself from task to task, that changes its economics as well.
So lets assume as an example, that there are six bays (loading docks) at the warehouse and each bay of the warehouse receives one truck a day which offloads up to 6 pallets that need to be transported on to the conveyor.
If all trucks arrive at the same time:
Six robots will efficiently unload them as soon as they arrive. (optimizing for truck parking time) At the expense of six robots.
One robot that can be packed up, moved, and unpacked, can work all bays at the cost of loading bays that cannot be reused until all previous bays have been unloaded. How long does that take? And how does it affect how many goods can be moved through the warehouse? (which is how money comes in)
Then there are trucks that arrive at different times. Same options but now you have idle robots (if you have six robots) which are waiting for a truck. Although you might be able to overlap robot movement with truck arrival to keep your bays reasonably busy.
At the outermost level of the problem (where the business people look at it), a warehouse is essentially a "switch" that moves goods from bulk carriers to more specific carriers. Each good moved through earns its percentage of the transport cost. Each good incurs a storage cost while sitting in the warehouse. Lots of metrics around how many times you can completely fill and empty the warehouse of goods vs the money you can get for transporting goods.
Bottom line is that reality (and logistics in particular) are pretty complicated and I expect there are times when a stationary arm would make more sense than a moving arm. However I consider the 'moving arm' to be the super class of 'arm' (to me it seems easier to turn an arm that can move on its own to one that is stationary, and much harder to give a stationary arm the ability to move.)
This is all true, my point was just that there's a lot of cutting-edge stuff here solving a solved problem.
The arm itself may be great. If you need it to be mobile, then there are much lower-tech solutions to that part of the puzzle, like a modified forklift. You can still have a computer drive it around if that makes sense.
“The roboticization of manufacturing is mostly finished“ -huh? 95% of the factories I go to don’t have the stuff at Promat. I was just at a UR beginner training class with engineers from fortune 50 companies. The robotic tools out there cover a vast majority of the processes but pricing, integration, and reusability still leave some huge holes in the market.
By reusability, I just mean most automation components that I see are single use and set up by integrators. I think they can continue to be simplified for factory engineers to reuse. Universal Robots is there, but most aren’t.
To me, saying robotization is complete is akin to saying computerization of business is complete because IBM has a mainframe.
>I'm not entirely certain that the role these bots are performing wouldn't be better served by a large stationary robotic arm
This was my reaction, though I suppose it's a capability-demonstration video. Would think in unloading, you'd want something heavier to unload full pallets/carts etc.
Possibly, they'd be useful for rare-item box picking in DC's, where the runs are long enough and infrequent enough that it's costly to carry a full shelf (slower transit speed, plus need for return trip)? Or maybe it's just a capabilities demonstration and the market caught on to the whole search and rescue thing [0].
From what I have been seeing from an industry that is ancillary to warehouse robotics needs (LIDAR sensor apparatus for UAVs and drone purposes), high resolution/high-performance small LIDAR are coming down a lot in cost now. And there are a number of new small machine vision startups selling LIDAR units for these sorts of purposes.
Those boxes are all the same size - Tetris on easy mode.
Pickle Robot is also working on this but with a fixed base and support for random box sizes/weights. We’ve just started scratching the surface of palletizing/loading with reinforcement learning.
If you are excited to come solve robotic box handling ping me! aj at picklerobot.com
I did a tour of the Cabot cheese factory in Vermont, and they have a fixed arm palletizing cheese wheel cartons. It looked a lot more reliable than these robots and seemed to have fewer moving parts.
The roboticization of manufacturing is mostly finished since factories work with identical outpus SKUs every time. Warehouses tend to have to handle a lot of different SKU but in a fairly regular way meaning that they're an environment that's pretty much ripe for robots to be entering just now. Goods to picker systems (like Kiva) have really taken off allowing robotic pickers like the one sold by us a nice ecological niche to fill. There are also companies with robotic forklifts and all sorts of other things.
I'm not entirely certain that the role these bots are performing wouldn't be better served by a large stationary robotic arm, as some other companies are working on now. It might very well be the best solution for unloading trucks?