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Building Amazon a Better Warehouse Robot

Posted by Soulskill on from the like-battlebots-but-kinda-boring dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: Amazon relies quite a bit on human labor, most notably in its warehouses. The company wants to change that via machine learning and robotics, which is why earlier this year it invited 30 teams to a "Picking Contest." In order to win the contest, a team needed to build a robot that can outpace other robots in detecting and identifying an object on a shelf, gripping said object without breaking it, and delivering it into a waiting receptacle. Team RBO, composed of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, won last month's competition by a healthy margin. Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit capable of picking up 12 objects in 20 minutes—not exactly blinding speed, but enough to demonstrate significant promise. If Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs). Chances seem good that Amazon will ask future teams to build machines that are even smarter and faster.

1 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Robots don't need to be as fast as humans by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Replying to my own post...

    http://www.rethinkrobotics.com...

    Found it...

    It costs $25,000 (down from the $30K number I remembered), it doesn't require special programming, you just show it what to do.

    Scroll down that page, look at what it can do, including putting items in boxes.

    Now it might not be ready for what Amazon needs, but given the size of Amazon's workforce, their budget, and the possible savings from having a million such robots and not needing to "surge hire" for the holidays, clearly this is a goal that Amazon will continue to peruse.

    ---

    A tenth of the speed of a human is not a problem when the hourly cost is 1/100th the price of a human.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Found that video as well, it is called "Humans Need Not Apply" and it covers some of the ideas for the future of such robots.