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Boston Dynamics unveils Stretch, a robot designed to move boxes in warehouses
- simion314 6y agoThe video also shows the dog robot, each time I see it I imagine there are versions with machine guns on their backs and get anxious, I would stop showing the dogs ones in the unrelated PR materials.
- ekianjo 6y agoCurrent flying drones are a lot scarier thsn dogs with machine guns
- MarcScott 6y agoEspecially when you add a flame thrower - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3_eEO0Cvwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3_eEO0Cvwg
- simion314 6y agoAre there such drones without human remote control? What would help at least me is to see this dogs actually used for something useful where they are the best solution, what I mean used in production not demos - because I can't imagine that many scenarios where are a good solution over a drone or a robot with wheels.
- bratcomplex 6y agoYes. Definitely. autonomous flying air craft are not new. much easier compared to anything moving on the ground. object and path detections is arguably less likely to fail being less contact with terrain.
- delfinom 6y ago>Are there such drones without human remote control? To be realistic. Spot (the dog) is not autonomous currently either. In fact it doesn't even use "AI", all of its movements are electrical and mechanical control theory on steroids ;) The BD customer can integrate an AI to direct movements if desired but it's not what BD ships. BD instead offers a human operated remote control with camera system.
- simion314 6y agoAny idea What is it good for?
- emteycz 6y agoSpaceX uses them to inspect still burning crashed spaceships (minutes post-crash).
- simion314 6y agoDo they do it for PR reasons? i assume you can use drones more effectively.
- emteycz 6y agoWhy do you think so? A drone has to be piloted the whole time, while a dog can be positioned and stay there with no further piloting or energy requirement. I also imagine that piloting a drone around hissing gas and in low vision could be problematic.
- simion314 6y agoSo if SpaceX needs video of the landing/crash sites then you could buy a few drones instead of a single dog. Because of possible debris and fire on the ground I also expect a drone would be better, and if teh land is clear then a drone could also be configured to land and film from the ground(because you could afford multiple ones you can have different configurations). I might be missing something though, a scenario where an robot with legs can do better then a flying or wheeled one.
- delfinom 6y agoTake any quadcopter, attach high explosives to it, ram them into people and blow them up. While you are at it, throw on a cheap raspberry pi with some simple machine learned computer vision to target humans. There, I made you afraid of cheap $100 quadcopters off Amazon and raspberry Pis.
- simion314 6y agoTrue, but there are like 1 billion more real world examples where this devices are used in production, so if you see a drone on the sky you think that is probably some kid with his toy, if you see the dog robot what scenario are you imagining ? (assume you are not on a big city with a university)
- serf 6y agoas someone who was into building quadcopters in the DIY drones community since somewhere around 2009, I can tell you that the majority of people who had the opportunity to see me flying my quadcopter (in the far-from-society rural wilderness, by the way) during the early days routinely bothered me about the danger of having such a large flying object, and whether or not I knew if anyone like me was placing weapons on-board. Now you can buy larger quad-copters than I had built off the shelf. Things change , people get used to it, opinions morph. When robotic dogs and bipeds become more common place, people will become less threatened by them just due to sheer anxiety fatigue, if not more friendly reasons. My take : when I see a robotic dog I think "That's a corporation with a spending budget!"
- imtringued 6y agoMost of them cannot carry any significant loads.
- lanternfish 6y agoYou don't need a very significant load to blow up a person.
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- scjody 6y agoJust don't call it a war dog! Boston Dynamics might get upset. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56182268 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56182268
- dane-pgp 6y ago> [Boston Dynamics] warned that if the "spectacle" goes ahead, Spot's warranty might be voided, meaning it could not be updated. Wait, so they reserve the right to void your warranty if you use their product to make art? I remember there was a case where a company bricked someone's device because they left a bad review[0], but having companies judge the artistic merit of their customers' use cases seems somehow even more dystopian. [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/iot-company-bricks-customers-device-after-negative-review/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/iot-company-bricks-cust...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoI'm torn on that scenario. They do not feel fear or worry about self preservation. There is no such thing as "I thought he had a gun and felt threatened."
- aksss 6y agoI could see plenty of "I thought he had a gun" scenarios, we're just chopping off the "...and felt threatened" part. Unless the robot accompanies a group of humans and decides they are threatened by the situation. It becomes "I thought he had a gun and decided the humans with me or around me were threatened". Maybe these robots could be outfitted to coat a person in immobilizing goo or something rather than filling them full of holes. Or long range tasers. Or tranq darts.
- perryizgr8 6y ago> I imagine there are versions with machine guns on their backs That actually sounds even more awesome :)
- ArkanExplorer 6y agoDesigned to move empty boxes via suction, as far as I can see in the video. How does it handle boxes that actually contain heavy objects?
- javahippie 6y agoThe manufacturer states it can "grab and move boxes up to 23 kilograms (50 lbs) in weight"
- ArkanExplorer 6y agoHere's the video Boston Dynamics released, showing the robot in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUuWWnfRsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUuWWnfRsk As far as I can see, boxes are picked up from one side, or the top. Some boxes would collapse due to this uneven distribution of force - a human worker would normally pick up a box from both sides, or the bottom.
- bluGill 6y agoHumans are only expected to be able to life 50lbs, you can go a little heavier, but it is no longer a weight that you can safely expect anyone to lift. You need to hire for strength to go above 50lbs. At 75lbs two humans are required to work as a team to lift for safety reasons (weight lifters can go beyond 600lbs alone, but not workers). I'm not sure where the next cutoff is, you soon need mechanical help to move anything.
- 0xdba 6y agoWeight lifters can go beyond 50+ lbs, safely, only if the weight is basically in barbell (or dumbbell, or whatever) format. A large 100lb box isn't being lifted by any smart weightlifter alone.
- leoc 6y agoThe World's Strongest Man format contains a number of events that are probably a lot closer to real workplace lifting tasks than barbell events are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Strongest_Man#Competition_format_and_commonly_contested_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Strongest_Man#Compet... . Though of course those full competition weights are very much an upper bound and wouldn't be viable as everyday one-man lifts even if you hired elite strongmen to be your warehouse operatives. OTOH 73kg (160lb) full beer kegs still get a fair bit of one-man manhandling, and to be a proper professional scaffolder you have to be able to lift a full-length scaffolding pole (just under 30kg, apparently?) from flat off the ground to straight up above your head, partly one-handed in one smooth movement, several times a day routinely.
- achow 6y agoThis looks like evolution of Boston Dynamic's 'Handle'. This URL which ends with 'handle' now redirects to an URL which ends with 'stretch': https://www.bostondynamics.com/handle https://www.bostondynamics.com/handle In 2019 BD released their updated Handle robots which used swinging counterbalance tail to lift warehouse boxes. Looked very dangerous to be around them; this 'Stretch' version seems to have been tamed much. APR2019 Handle: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/boston-dynamics-warehouse-robots-acquires-kinema-systems https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...
- monkeydust 6y agoGees yea that wont pass health and safety... impressive though!
- 4ggr0 6y agoYou can see a robot similar to 'Handle' dancing here: https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw?t=87 https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw?t=87
- villgax 6y agoThey went around the actual hand-like manipulators to lift boxes from the top & bottom edges like human hands would but with vacuum suckers. Almost reminds me of the last DARPA challenge for humanoid robots where KAIST cheated with a robot which simply rolled from one place to another & did super slow stairs one leg at a time, which was exactly what the competition was supposed to overcome.
- wodenokoto 6y agoThis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o Can you explain more about how they "cheated"? it looks like they were awarded 1st prize.
- mitchdoogle 6y agoMaybe OP has an ideal these guys didn't live up to. They designed the robot according to the course - there's no sense in which that is cheating.
- bmcahren 6y agoI think he's saying the spirit of the competition was failed because it took over 1 minute per step which if this was a consumer or commercial product...would have been a failure. 4 steps look like it took 5+ minutes. Hard to tell because they sped up the footage 20X to make it look reasonable.
- villgax 6y agoThe purpose was to have resilient robots for disaster operations, and to do away with slower robotic platforms.
- dylan604 6y agoDid that robot just jerk the plug from the wall by pulling the cord rather than the plug itself? That's such a no-no. Even though there's no actual plug, but what else was that supposed to simulate?
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- xutopia 6y agoIt's the least sexy of the videos I see from them in ages but also the robot that seems to the most utility.
- arsalanb 6y agoSeems like it places great trust in the structural integrity of the packaging/box. BD claims it can "grab and move" boxes up to 23 kgs. I've done some work in Mech Engg. designing grippers for smaller objects, and gripping objects is often the hardest part. From an operations research perspective, a human will figure out the best way to carry a box that is almost falling apart almost intuitively. I can see this being extremely useful in, say, a large warehouse where it is isolated to finding and moving boxes to loading bays, particularly through an API. Amazon is already doing this, and this video is highly relevant here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sEVX4mPuto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sEVX4mPuto
- grumple 6y agoWow, I have vastly underestimated Amazon's technological lead. I worked in a non-Amazon warehouse many moons ago, and they weren't doing anything even in the same atmosphere as this.
- Symmetry 6y agoKiva bots are cool and have some advantages but I wouldn't say they're that much more advanced than other AS/RSes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_storage_and_retrieval_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_storage_and_retrieva... For warehouses willing to make capital investments automating the process of getting bins to pickers is a pretty well understood problem. Getting boxes out of trucks like Boston Dynamics is doing here and getting items out of bins and into boxes like we[1] are doing are the frontiers of warehouse automation right now. [1] http://www.righthandrobotics.com/ http://www.righthandrobotics.com/
- tralarpa 6y agoThe number of robots and their speed are really impressive. But the concept is not so new. I saw robots driving around with parts at a car manufacturer in 1991 or 1992.
- achow 6y agoI think it is not that bleeding edge a thing. Flipkart (India's Amazon, acquired by Walmart since then) deployed similar things in their warehouse: https://inc42.com/buzz/flipkart-deploys-100-automated-robots-in-its-bengaluru-delivery-hub/ https://inc42.com/buzz/flipkart-deploys-100-automated-robots... Yet another warehouse robotics startup from India: https://www.greyorange.com/ https://www.greyorange.com/
- jacquesm 6y agodupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523
- JshWright 6y agoI hope its programmed to detect the sudden drop in weight when the bottom of the box gives out and spills the contents on the floor.
- sporkologist 6y agoYeah it tells the glue machine to lay it on a little thicker next time.
- underseacables 6y agoI wonder how much Amazon is investing in automated robots for their warehouses, and whether unionization has encouraged them to invest more. Not to be glib, but I could imagine Jeff Bezos saying “no man, no problem“
- pydry 6y agoHim treating humans like robots is why they're unionizing in the first place.
- loceng 6y agoAnd society not giving an adequate UBI to help make people anti-exploitation is why unionizing has needed to become a thing.
- maskedoffender 6y agoYou'll just get more and more people believing all work is exploitation and they'll stop working. Then the people still working will have higher taxes, feel that they're being exploited by the people not working, and soon everybody will be unemployed and nobody will be exploited and it'll be paradise.
- loceng 6y agoQuite the unsupported fantasy you've put forward - sounds similar to the argument that once people have enough money they'll stop working, so better pay them only enough to survive - until you include billionaires into the equation, who don't stop working when they have enough to live for 1,000s of years.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y agoBillionaires are crazy kind of folks. To realize what people are going to do when they don't have to work, look at those in retirement: gardening, choir singing, lotto may be?
- cbm-vic-20 6y agoTL;DR: This is an Inserter from Factorio that can move and built its own Transport Belt.
- traveler01 6y agoAh good Im not the only one noticing it.
- dylan604 6y agoseems like you could back up that claim with some links
- sturza 6y agoyou could just google it instead
- dylan604 6y agoi'm not the one making accusational claims. if i were the one making claims, i'd offer some sort of backing materials. otherwise, let's just all start making stuff up
- ChefboyOG 6y agoIt's not an accusational claim. It's a joke about a popular game. This is not an insane discourse on the nature of evidence, it's simply a reference you weren't familiar with.
- timothyduong 6y agoThose claims are based on a fictional game. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABDLuHlNjHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABDLuHlNjHE
- blunte 6y agoEventually they will need a solution which can grip boxes more like a human (especially being able to adjust grip to handle boxes that begin to deform). This one-side suction system will obviously fail if the box itself cannot hold its contents without ripping or deforming. I would rather see the robot get better than we start using bigger boxes with lighter loads just to make it easier for the robots. I already receive too-big boxes and too much paper packing stuffing.
- derefr 6y agoYou don’t need bigger last-mile boxes. They could just “wrap” each item (or many items of the same SKU) in a reusable transport bin for its lifetime in the warehouse; move the bins themselves around; and then pick the items out of the bin (or invert the bin right over a final shipping box) when they leave.
- curryst 6y agoThis is almost inevitable. The current situation is designed for humans. The boxes generally hold together; the number that fail either structurally (deformed) or catastrophically (contents destroyed) is probably within some tolerance. Deformed boxes cost basically nothing with humans. These robots appear to have a gentler touch than what I'm guessing humans do, based on the health of the cardboard I receive from humans. They might make it feasible to create re-usable plastic boxes that have some kind of an anchor point. I've got a friend that works in the field and have seen their machines in operation and how they work on their contracts. The use cases right now seem to be entirely human defined; i.e. it handles items that weren't modified to make it easier on the robot, and it handles items in a random orientation. Could be turned, could be upside down, could be balanced on a corner against another item. If robots take over more of the pipeline, you can start guaranteeing that boxes are oriented correctly, which gives you a lot more practical options than "cover it in hooks, and we'll worry about how to stack it later". Space in containers is also a big concern, so anything that increases the size of a good is generally bad (last-mile delivery excepted).
- blunte 6y agoPresumably we'll see (or not see, but it will happen) improvements in all steps of the process of packing, sending, and delivering goods. This is a... good thing. And perhaps with more automation and logistics improvements, reusable last-mile containers can become common. We already receive our one of our grocery deliveries in foldable crates which get re-used (one set always sitting empty at home, and traded to the delivery driver for crates with new groceries). There's a lot of room for improvement here.
- agumonkey 6y agoWhat will happen to the fleet of human stock running in their warehouse right now ? Will they become Stretch fleet controller ?
- savrajsingh 6y agoUninstalled, put on a basic income. Have you seen the matrix? :)
- throwawayboise 6y agoSo we'll have to tax the companies to pay for the UBI. The company's choice: pay wages to humans, or pay for robots plus UBI for people not working. Which is cheaper?
- Armisael16 6y agoShifting to robots is unlikely to put the burden for paying for those people entirely on the one corporation. It’ll be spread out across all taxpayers. It’s a tragedy of the commons (that may not actually be tragic).
- agumonkey 6y agoI had a weird dream about the matrix, as if the fact that this movie was made didn't save us from becoming plugged bodies into the virtual world .. instead it's sadly becoming the most plausible future.
- westpfelia 6y agoThe Capitalist dream will occur and they will all lose their jobs.
- ingend88 6y agoDoes anyone know of a kitchen version of this that can be used at home to automate cooking ?
- newsbinator 6y agoThat doesn't sound as efficient or cost-effective as ordering things from an automated delivery restaurant nearby. 1- Decide what you want made and how you want it made (by choosing ingredients and cooking methods from a UI) 2- Place your order 3- Automated Restaurant queues your custom order, picks ingredients, cooks according to your preferences, and packs it 4. Drone (or human) delivers it rapidly, while still warm Better to fill a big warehouse-size restaurant with robots than to fill a million kitchens with robots.
- blueblisters 6y agoYep, I don't think buying a robot that just cooks 3 or 4 meals a day per household will ever make economic sense.
- cookingrobot 6y agoI think if you could get it down to the price of a car it would make sense for a lot of households. Families are really busy, and meal prep/cleanup takes a lot of time.
- dane-pgp 6y agouser: cookingrobot created: July 28, 2009
- j-pb 6y agoWhy does everything have to be as cost effective as possile? I'd much rather have robots in my kitchen and my garden that grow fresh vegetables on my soil, adapted to my preferences, and turn them into dishes that match my taste, than the end-product of a ginormous industrial farming machine. 60-70% of the worlds food supply comes from family farmers, yet most pesticide and fertiliser usage is in industrial farming. Factory farming is only cheaper because artificial fertiliser is so cheap, but if you look at the "costs" on the entire system/ecosystem it's a lot more expensive. If you only view food as a source of nutrition and energy, then this might seem reasonable, but it completely ignores the socio-cultural aspects of cooking. Having a robot in your kitchen allows you to share in the work, to learn from it, and teach it. Maybe you cut the tomatoes while it peels the onions. Or you start cooking, and it finishes for you. Maybe you cook your lunch, but because you want to wake to the smell of freshly baked croissant, the robot does it. There is an infinite spectrum of interaction, learning, and joy that could come from this, that goes beyond merely eating the prepared dish. Maybe small restaurants in the style of old Japanese eating houses combined with community gardens would be a good middle ground though, but having industrial take-out everyday sounds like a dystopia to me.
- dang 6y agoOngoing related thread: Stretch from Boston Dynamics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619523 - March 2021 (62 comments)
- tyingq 6y agoI'd be interested to hear about the safety features. "its mobile base means it can slot into spaces designed for humans" Sounds like there would be the temptation to have it running near humans. It looks pretty heavy and powerful.
- daotoad 6y agoAnd to think that I laughed at the Daleks' plunger hands...
- wayanon 6y agoNice but I don’t trust the suction box top method - though maybe it works if you can guarantee the box strength.
- Pfhreak 6y agoGiven how many suction cups there are, it seems like it would distribute the lifting force across the top of the box pretty evenly. Like the inverse of the 'bed of nails' phenomena.
- jakeinspace 6y agoLots of comments about the limitations of the suction grabber, but I wonder if anyone here has an educated guess as to how far we are from the robotic hand dexterity needed for near human-level manipulation of relatively simple objects like boxes. I know it's a notoriously hard problem that sci-fi has always underestimated the difficulty of. It seems like while we might near human-level precision for tasks which don't require speed||torque||low cost (robotic surgery being an example of such an unconstrained problem), the minimum viability for a factory floor robot seems pretty high: cheaper than a low-wage human, factoring in both up-front capital cost plus operating cost per box moved per hour. So realistically, you can't sell a robot with human-level accuracy and reliability for $200k with additional operational and maintainance costs on top of that.
- tootie 6y agoThere's also loads of existing industrial robots that do pick and place with suction grippers. It's a pretty well-established solution.
- curryst 6y agoYou still might be able to. There are a lot of considerations for having humans around that robots don't need. Bathrooms, HR, qualms about unemployment, bad PR from treating warehouse workers poorly, parking spaces, aisle space to allow humans to pass each other, etc, etc. A huge part of the gains come from completely eliminating humans, and getting rid of all the niceties that come with human labor. I strongly suspect that it will come down to the opex to maintain the robots than the capex to buy them. If opex is lower than hiring humans, companies will buy in. You can get tax breaks on the capex for the robots as you devalue them. Robots also shield your opex (right now), because nobody is clamoring that the robots should get paid more. Your labor costs for humans could double at any point; even $15/hr isn't keeping pace with inflation if you look back to the 50's or 60's. > Lots of comments about the limitations of the suction grabber, but I wonder if anyone here has an educated guess as to how far we are from the robotic hand dexterity needed for near human-level manipulation of relatively simple objects like boxes. We already have have the means to do human-level manipulation like that, it just doesn't use a hand. I have a buddy that works in the space and have seen their robots go. If you want your box up on it's side, the robot will do that for you. I don't think we're likely to see a big push towards human hands. Hands are great generalist manipulators, and are good when you don't know what kind of stuff you'll have to handle. That doesn't really apply to robots, though. There are almost always more specialized designs that are cheaper to make, cheaper to repair, and better at handling the item in question. Just thinking about boxes, for example, a forklift seems infinitely better at handling boxes with potentially weak bottoms than a human is. Our hands cannot support the full length of the box. Looking at surgery, almost the entire point of human hands is to manipulate tools which were designed to be manipulated by human hands. Just attach the tool directly to an arm on a platform that can spin and angle itself like a wrist. No need for overly-complex fingers that might drop a scalpel on someone's face. I don't see human hands being a useful design for a robot until we get general artificial intelligence. If I can ask the robot to go perform a novel task, then it makes sense to equip it in a way that it can handle any kind of generic object. Until then, the robot was designed for a purpose, and it makes sense to choose specialized manipulators.
- dirtyid 6y agoPretty poor stacking. Probably could be met half way with better boxes. Some perforated holes in corners like intermodal containers with a rubber membrane outside for seals. QR / reference prints for better alignment.
- bitwize 6y agoI like how it takes the Spot out of the box and seems to look at it curiously. Very WALL•E. Nice showmanship.
- boublepop 6y agoYou have to appreciate that we have some of the top minds of the world working on revolutionary technology with the ultimate aim of making a huge group of our population unemployed so the richest man in the world richer. And naturally this receives government funding. I know this is of cause done because it’s an easy target for robotics, and proves a value stream. But you still have to wonder just how big of a societal change we could achieve if these efforts where target at empowering and improving the lives of the masses instead of removing the “annoyance” of having to pay minimum wage workers as part of the costs of huge insanely profitable corporations.
- iams 6y agoAre you a subsistance farmer? If not then your job exists because of automation. Every single product that exists exists because we have automated away something is the past. Every book, tv show, pop song has been produced by people who in previous generations would have had to spend their days hunting and gathering. Automation frees up people to innovate. What's sad is that we still have people who spend their whole lives doing jobs that could easily be done by robots.
- xchip 6y agoApparently it can move empty boxes very fast!