Andrew Meyer, Pickle’s boss, believes Dill has an edge over the competition because Pickle’s engineers have focused on the robot’s ability to handle messy trailers with irregular loads. The aim is that it will be able to handle 800 cases an hour.Ī third contender, Dill, is made by the Pickle Robot Company, also based in Massachusetts. Unlike Honeywell’s system, Stretch can already manage the trick of examining a wall of boxes, working out their sizes and shapes, and choosing which to pick up first. It sports a single arm festooned with sensors and a suction gripper able to handle boxes weighing up to about 25kg. Stretch is smaller and more mobile than Honeywell’s robot, and is able, according to Kevin Blankespoor, Boston Dynamics’ general manager of warehouse robotics, to move easily from one lorry to another, or to a different part of a site altogether. The firm’s good-handling system, Stretch, is, however, the first it has custom-built for a particular task. Boston Dynamics is famous in the wider world for an acrobatic humanoid robot called Atlas, and for Spot, a robot that resembles a dog and is now on sale as a device for monitoring what is happening in factories and other large spaces. In Massachusetts, a firm called Boston Dynamics takes a different approach from Honeywell’s. He is therefore negotiating with one of the potential customers for the robot, a company that already handles this volume of business, to do the training there. They are, though, Dr Evans says, no substitute for the real thing. Ideally, that number would be nearer 100-but running tests at this scale would be expensive. Dr Evans says his team can put together about four such test loads a day. This is both time-consuming and labour-intensive. At the moment, therefore, it works best with boxes of uniform size and shape.Ĭhanging that will need a lot of training, which, in turn, means designing and assembling a variety of dummy loads inside a variety of vehicles. But it is still a challenge for it to distinguish between individual boxes and to recognise and identify anomalous objects such as loose pallets and the pallet jacks used to move stacked pallets around. Thomas Evans, chief technology officer of Honeywell’s robotics operation, says the robot does not need to be as precise as the pick-and-place robots that work on assembly lines. Honeywell hopes that, once its robot is perfected, a single crew chief will be able to supervise the simultaneous unloading of three or four lorries, each at rates of up to 1,500 boxes an hour. An individual human worker can unload between 600 and 1,200 boxes an hour. It has a large arm fitted with suction cups which can pick up several boxes at a time and then feed them onto a conveyor belt, or knock down a wall of boxes and sweep them onto the conveyor. The robotics division of Honeywell, a large American technology company, has come up with a vehicle-sized unit (see picture) that fits onto the back of a lorry. A new generation of cargo-handling robots is poised to take on the task. Unloading lorries is therefore one of the few parts of operating a warehouse that has resisted automation. People learn how to do such things gradually, as they grow up. Or the robot may need to work out how to lift an irregular consignment like a set of skis. Shrink-wrapped pallets of packages are one thing, the miscellaneous jumbles of objects handled by parcel-delivery businesses quite another. The less tidy the contents, the greater the problem. The next question is what the robot should do with what it sees.
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