Cute Look at the Robots Amazon Just Bought for $775 Million

allthingsd.com

9 pointsevo_93 comments

Why is there even a human picker? In the video it looks like all the picker does is grab the item from the inventory pod and put it in a box. That seems like it can definitely be automated.

Robots are better at specialized, repeatable tasks. In Kiva's case, they developed robots that interact with exclusively pods, not the warehouse items themselves.

Creating a grasping robot that can recognize, lift and efficiently pack the thousands of different objects in the warehouse is a very hard problem. Robots would have to be prepared for every possible item, orientation and configuration while doing the packing. Plus, warehouses get completely new products all the time, which would require training updates. (Or just strong AI).

The coordinated movement of square pods in a grid system is super cool and complicated looking, but it's much easier than all the object recognition and manipulation tasks we take for granted.

After getting chastised not that long ago for not having the best work conditions for their human pickers... not enough breaks, not enough pay, unsatisfactory climate conditions...Amazon moves to robots. Problem solved.

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