[HN Gopher] Boston Dynamics unveils Stretch, a robot designed to...
___________________________________________________________________
Boston Dynamics unveils Stretch, a robot designed to move boxes in
warehouses
Author : kyleShropshire
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-03-29 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| jacquesm wrote:
| dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523
| JshWright wrote:
| I hope its programmed to detect the sudden drop in weight when
| the bottom of the box gives out and spills the contents on the
| floor.
| agumonkey wrote:
| What will happen to the fleet of human stock running in their
| warehouse right now ? Will they become Stretch fleet controller ?
| savrajsingh wrote:
| Uninstalled, put on a basic income. Have you seen the matrix?
| :)
| throwawayboise wrote:
| 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?
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| westpfelia wrote:
| The Capitalist dream will occur and they will all lose their
| jobs.
| achow wrote:
| 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.
|
| APR2019 Handle:
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...
| monkeydust wrote:
| Gees yea that wont pass health and safety... impressive though!
| ingend88 wrote:
| Does anyone know of a kitchen version of this that can be used at
| home to automate cooking ?
| newsbinator wrote:
| That doesn't sound as efficient or cost-effective as ordering
| things from an automated delivery restaurant nearby.
|
| 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.
| blueblisters wrote:
| Yep, I don't think buying a robot that just cooks 3 or 4
| meals a day per household will ever make economic sense.
| cookingrobot wrote:
| 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.
| j-pb wrote:
| 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.
| tW4r wrote:
| 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/
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| 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)
| petra wrote:
| Automated cooking at home might look something similar to this:
| https://olivercooks.com/.
|
| Still missing the ingredient prep though.
| underseacables wrote:
| 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"
| pydry wrote:
| Him treating humans like robots is why they're unionizing in
| the first place.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Could it be because these people do robotic jobs?
| lovegoblin wrote:
| Even if so, they still deserve to be treated like people.
| loceng wrote:
| And society not giving an adequate UBI to help make people
| anti-exploitation is why unionizing has needed to become a
| thing.
| maskedoffender wrote:
| 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.
| igorkraw wrote:
| 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
| loceng wrote:
| 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.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Billionaires are crazy kind of folks.
|
| 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?
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| villgax wrote:
| 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.
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| Did any of the competitors do better?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o
|
| Can you explain more about how they "cheated"? it looks like
| they were awarded 1st prize.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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."
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Maybe OP has an ideal these guys didn't live up to. They
| designed the robot according to the course - there's no sense
| in which that is cheating.
| bmcahren wrote:
| 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.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| TL;DR: This is an Inserter from Factorio that can move and built
| its own Transport Belt.
| dylan604 wrote:
| seems like you could back up that claim with some links
| timothyduong wrote:
| Those claims are based on a fictional game.
|
| Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABDLuHlNjHE
| sturza wrote:
| you could just google it instead
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| traveler01 wrote:
| Ah good Im not the only one noticing it.
| dang wrote:
| Ongoing related thread:
|
| _Stretch from Boston Dynamics_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523 - March 2021 (62
| comments)
| daotoad wrote:
| And to think that I laughed at the Daleks' plunger hands...
| wayanon wrote:
| Nice but I don't trust the suction box top method - though maybe
| it works if you can guarantee the box strength.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| 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.
| xutopia wrote:
| It's the least sexy of the videos I see from them in ages but
| also the robot that seems to the most utility.
| arsalanb wrote:
| 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.
|
| Amazon is already doing this, and this video is highly relevant
| here -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sEVX4mPuto
| grumple wrote:
| 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.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Kiva bots are cool and have some advantages but I wouldn't
| say they're that much more advanced than other AS/RSes.
|
| 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/
| tralarpa wrote:
| 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.
| achow wrote:
| I think it is not that bleeding edge a thing.
|
| 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/
| abledon wrote:
| 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)
|
| Stay strong factory workers!
| delfinom wrote:
| Amazon bought out a company with an nearly ready product.
|
| 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.
| notJim wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| 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.
| vl wrote:
| > 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.
| oceanghost wrote:
| Two of the oddest UPS statuses I have received were (I
| might be paraphrasing a bit):
|
| "Package destroyed, contents discarded." (it was a piece of
| furniture with a glass component).
|
| and
|
| "Package delayed due to train derailment."
| mulmen wrote:
| 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?
| tpmx wrote:
| > 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.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| There's something to be said for building the entire warehouse
| to support automation, versus trying to build a robot that can
| work in any warehouse.
| monkeydust wrote:
| True but there is massive long tail of warehouses in
| operations where this is not possible right now so I can see
| this working.
|
| Does anyone know the cost?
| blunte wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| scjody wrote:
| Just don't call it a war dog! Boston Dynamics might get upset.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56182268
| ekianjo wrote:
| Current flying drones are a lot scarier thsn dogs with machine
| guns
| MarcScott wrote:
| Especially when you add a flame thrower -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3_eEO0Cvwg
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| bratcomplex wrote:
| 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.
| delfinom wrote:
| >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.
| simion314 wrote:
| Any idea What is it good for?
| emteycz wrote:
| SpaceX uses them to inspect still burning crashed
| spaceships (minutes post-crash).
| simion314 wrote:
| Do they do it for PR reasons? i assume you can use drones
| more effectively.
| emteycz wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Fires, especially large hots ones, create wind and other
| aerodynamic instability.
| delfinom wrote:
| 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.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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)
| westpfelia wrote:
| My duder you should watch this video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
| imtringued wrote:
| Most of them cannot carry any significant loads.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Standard hand grenade is roughly 400g / 1 pound; 40mm
| grenade launcher ammo often is half a pound / 230 grams.
|
| That's considered reasonably effective by the militaries,
| and fully within the capabilities of many cheap
| quadcopters.
| lanternfish wrote:
| You don't need a very significant load to blow up a person.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| 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].
|
| [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...
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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."
| aksss wrote:
| 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.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Designed to move empty boxes via suction, as far as I can see in
| the video. How does it handle boxes that actually contain heavy
| objects?
| javahippie wrote:
| The manufacturer states it can "grab and move boxes up to 23
| kilograms (50 lbs) in weight"
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Here's the video Boston Dynamics released, showing the robot
| in action:
|
| https://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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Problem is boxes are not necessarily designed to be suspended
| in the air by lids
| jlarocco wrote:
| I don't see what the problem is.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| vl wrote:
| And yet UPS just successfully delivered 88 pound kettlebell
| to my doorstep.
| 0xdba wrote:
| 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.
| leoc wrote:
| 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.wikipedi
| a.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.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| 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.
| Teever wrote:
| 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.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| 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).
| amelius wrote:
| For those you simply increase the ambient pressure in the room.
| djmips wrote:
| Not unlike the Alcubierre drive approach. (please downvote
| this)
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Reminds me of TNG: Deja Q, in order to move something of
| large mass simply "change the gravitational constant of the
| universe." Thanks John De Lancie.
| craftinator wrote:
| Comments like this are why I come to HN! Both true, and
| satirical. Well done!
| djmips wrote:
| Comments like that are why you go to Reddit.
| emteycz wrote:
| No, we go to reddit for comments like yours.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Damn, no levity allowed on HN now.
| tomcam wrote:
| Beautiful
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| 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.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear about the safety features.
|
| _" 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-29 23:01 UTC)