Robot sorting system helps Chinese company sort 200,000 packages a day | Hacker News Reader

Robot sorting system helps Chinese company sort 200,000 packages a day

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22 pointshourislate7 comments

What's the advantage over just scanning them and having a conveyor belt system channel it to the right spot?

Human doesn't have to think?

I think it's flexibility and less fixed infrastructure. You don't have to build a conveyor belt system to cover a rectangular area. You just need holes and navigation grid for the robot swarm, and charging docks -- essentially trading hardware complexity for software complexity.

You still have to build tons of vertical slots and a ton of floor space for all of those slots. Also I feel that this thing will start getting a exponential congestion problem.

The layout from the video:

oox ooo ooo

Which means that you need 9 grids for every one slot. Further, and this is where a proof would be needed, you'd have the following robot placements:

roxrox rRRrRR rrrrRR roxrox rRRrRR rrrrRR

One robot can move in this case but I'm not sure this is optimal. At this density I'm betting that you get into exponential moves to move all the way from 0,0 to 6,6.

If you were more like roxrox orooro rorror roxrox orooro rorror

you could more likely keep channels of movement.

This is similar to a chip routing problem. So that's why you go vertical planes as well. But you still get limited throughput.

I may have the math wrong (I haven't done it)

EDIT: Ugh, no pre tags, take the ror ooo and line them up vertially on the breaks.

Both are interchangeable except if you have A large or long item, a few robots can move in sync.

There is a person putting the parcels on the robots.

I suspect for now the package has to be placed facing up so an OCR of some type can scan the address and instruct the robot to a particular shoot to drop the package. I would expect that eventually the whole process is automated where the package will drop onto the robot without human intervention.

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