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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

I'd say if Amazon adopts this kind of robot for their warehouses they won't worry about investing a bit more into reliable packaging. It's still going to be cheaper than paying a monthly salary.

> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?

Sometimes you're unloading or on the receiving end of disintegrating boxes, and you need to unload the container the freight came in. This is to receive in the damaged product to your warehouse before you can claim it.

Two examples I from bring on the receiving end: - ocean freight were water gets in through holes / damaged parts of the container that cause all the packaging material to breakdown - beverages being punctured or otherwise leaking causing all packaging material to be damaged

In an ideal state, you don't have damaged packaging because you can use clamps, slips, or other specially designed conveyance equipment.

> 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.

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."

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?

"Civil unrest".

Interesting. The only damaged deliveries I’ve ever received happened when someone sent me something fragile via Canada Post. It seems that when it arrived at the post office, they carefully took the broken box and all the leaked-out bits, put the whole assemblage into another, larger box, printed a new shipping label for the larger box, and shipped it on. So I received a clean, sturdy outer box, containing some detritus and a redundantly-labelled inner box, in turn containing the rest of my shipment. (I assume, if something in the inner box had been a liquid and leaked out through the box, they’d have put the whole inner box in a plastic bag before putting that in a box.)

Making that the general approach would probably solve the automation problem pretty cleanly. You could even have broken-package-packaging robots at each cargo-unloading step!

AngelSoft toilet paper comes in big cardboard case packs that have a diagonal perforation so that the top half-ish can be torn off and the case set on a self as a sort of display. No one does that with AngelSoft because the boxes are ugly but you see it with other things.

The problem here is that the perforations will easily tear under the weight of a full case so it's extremely common for it to give out if you try to pick it up by the top.

but who cares if the case makes it to the store in one piece because we only care about the packs inside.

Agreed re: loading, but it's still important to be able to carry that disintegrating box to a pack station to be repacked. Usually you can't do that on the spot, since having a box strewn about on the warehouse floor is a pretty big safety hazard.

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