April 5, 2017
...AND CHEAPER...:
A Robot with Its Head in the Cloud Tackles Warehouse Picking : A dexterous new robotic gripper can manipulate unfamiliar objects, and it shares what it learns with a hive mind in the cloud. (Will Knight April 5, 2017, MIT Technology Review)
Hidden inside a busy industrial building in Somerville, Massachusetts, a robot arm spends its day picking up seemingly random objects--bottles of shampoo, onions, cans of shaving foam--from a conveyor belt that goes in a circle about 10 meters in diameter.The odd-looking setup is a test bed for a system that could take on many of the mundane picking tasks currently done by hand in warehouses and fulfillment centers. And it shows how advances in robotic hardware, computer vision, and teleoperation, along with the ability for machines to learn collaboratively via the cloud, may transform warehouse fulfillment in coming years.The new robotic picking platform, which uses a combination of a hybrid gripper and machine learning, and which was developed by a startup called RightHand Robotics, can handle a wide variety of objects faster and more reliably than existing systems.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2017 5:48 PM