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I'm curious how this works on the other side of the warehouse - in shipping. Especially once you start thinking about the games of tetris that are played when

I'm curious how this works on the other side of the warehouse - in shipping. Especially once you start thinking about the games of tetris that are played when loading the container. Boxes are often not uniform in dimensions or weight, nor should they be loaded like they are in the picture if it can be avoided. They need to be interlocked (assuming non-cubic boxes) so that the entire load doesn't come crashing down if it shifts.

mattlondon 5y ago
The article mentions this - TL;Dr: not yet for the robots due to planning complexities that you mention.
sb057 5y ago
Speaking from experience, there's two main strategies: 1) Diligence, care, time, and luck on the part of the loader, carefully stacking boxes in such a way to make sure there isn't any room for the boxes to shift in transit or fall over when unloading. 2) Just throw it all in a big pile and hope nothing breaks. Both are roughly equally common.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Yeah, I use UPS too
awofford 5y ago
I used to work at a factory that was doing this (loading the trucks for shipping with a robot). It took much longer to implement than expected, but eventually worked pretty well. In the beginning, we would test by driving the loaded truck on a typical route and then checking the contents. The first few times were a disaster with boxes thrown all over the trailer. It was very cool to watch the robot work.
narrator 5y ago
Perhaps we can use the golden hammer of deep learning for this? Maybe the input layer would be a 3d tensor with a 1 for the of space taken by each box, or the edge of each box, and a zero for everything else. The output layer would be a quality score that would be the result of a simulation of how badly the boxes were damaged given the truck shifting wildly. Then the model, when sufficiently trained, could be used by the packer robot to iterate solutions on the boxes it had for packing to achieve the best predicted quality score?
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  You don't need (unreliable, prone to out of distribution breakage) deep learning for this. Bin packing is a well known problem in optimization literature and there are established algorithms for solving it with bounds on distance to optimality.
  - candiodari 5y ago
    But when it comes to actually controlling the putting of the boxes in the truck the way the bin packing algorithm wants, you need deep learning. In case the robot slips a bit, changing direction a bit, on someone's handkerchief on the floor or whatever.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      There exist methods to guarantee robustness within a certain L_p ball on your parameters (in this case the box positions). I'm sure with only a few hundred boxes they would be tractable to solve to optimality. The actual robotics part is definitely deep learning though.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        > The actual robotics part is definitely deep learning though. Why? Moving machine arms smoothly has been a thing for a long time.
        candiodari 5y ago
        If you can provide exact coordinates of every box, then yes, mostly* (including correct guesses of where the box can be grabbed without ripping it. Of course exact coordinates are required even when the box is moving. If it shifts when you're grabbing/lifting/putting it down, you still have complete the action correctly). Or to put it more in engineer wording: it's going to be far more robust to environment changes. And I would argue that whilst the machine learning way is pretty complex it's still simpler than 3d motion planning of moving robot platforms. And one machine learning solution can adapt to many robots with just retraining, without redoing the formulas from scratch. * technically on a moving robot platform it hasn't entirely been solved, but good enough solutions do exist.
Animats 5y ago
That's routinely done by automatic palletizers. Here's a standalone robotic palletizer for mixed pallets.[1] Here's an entire automated distribution center.[2] This is more traditional automation. Pallets come in, are broken apart, and items put into storage. Then items are assembled to fill orders, and stacked on pallets. They even call it "automated Tetris". They try to stack the items to match a retail store's planogram, so the people doing shelf restocking usually have what they need next on top. Objects are lifted from the bottom, or sometimes grabbed from two sides, so they don't rely on super-strong cardboard. The forklifts that empty and fill trucks with pallets are still human-driven in that system. Automated forklifts do exist.[3] They're still rare, though. All this gear seems to come from more advanced countries that don't have an underclass for cheap labor. New Zealand, Germany, the Scandinavian countries. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtH19n3CzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtH19n3CzE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB9T-I7Fh7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB9T-I7Fh7U [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxEEmukZ4R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxEEmukZ4R4

mattlondon 5y ago

The article mentions this - TL;Dr: not yet for the robots due to planning complexities that you mention.

sb057 5y ago

Speaking from experience, there's two main strategies: 1) Diligence, care, time, and luck on the part of the loader, carefully stacking boxes in such a way to make sure there isn't any room for the boxes to shift in transit or fall over when unloading. 2) Just throw it all in a big pile and hope nothing breaks. Both are roughly equally common.

tomcam 5y ago
Yeah, I use UPS too

awofford 5y ago

I used to work at a factory that was doing this (loading the trucks for shipping with a robot). It took much longer to implement than expected, but eventually worked pretty well. In the beginning, we would test by driving the loaded truck on a typical route and then checking the contents. The first few times were a disaster with boxes thrown all over the trailer. It was very cool to watch the robot work.

narrator 5y ago

Perhaps we can use the golden hammer of deep learning for this? Maybe the input layer would be a 3d tensor with a 1 for the of space taken by each box, or the edge of each box, and a zero for everything else. The output layer would be a quality score that would be the result of a simulation of how badly the boxes were damaged given the truck shifting wildly. Then the model, when sufficiently trained, could be used by the packer robot to iterate solutions on the boxes it had for packing to achieve the best predicted quality score?

b9a2cab5 5y ago
You don't need (unreliable, prone to out of distribution breakage) deep learning for this. Bin packing is a well known problem in optimization literature and there are established algorithms for solving it with bounds on distance to optimality.
- candiodari 5y ago
  But when it comes to actually controlling the putting of the boxes in the truck the way the bin packing algorithm wants, you need deep learning. In case the robot slips a bit, changing direction a bit, on someone's handkerchief on the floor or whatever.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    There exist methods to guarantee robustness within a certain L_p ball on your parameters (in this case the box positions). I'm sure with only a few hundred boxes they would be tractable to solve to optimality. The actual robotics part is definitely deep learning though.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      > The actual robotics part is definitely deep learning though. Why? Moving machine arms smoothly has been a thing for a long time.
      - candiodari 5y ago
        If you can provide exact coordinates of every box, then yes, mostly* (including correct guesses of where the box can be grabbed without ripping it. Of course exact coordinates are required even when the box is moving. If it shifts when you're grabbing/lifting/putting it down, you still have complete the action correctly). Or to put it more in engineer wording: it's going to be far more robust to environment changes. And I would argue that whilst the machine learning way is pretty complex it's still simpler than 3d motion planning of moving robot platforms. And one machine learning solution can adapt to many robots with just retraining, without redoing the formulas from scratch. * technically on a moving robot platform it hasn't entirely been solved, but good enough solutions do exist.

Animats 5y ago

That's routinely done by automatic palletizers. Here's a standalone robotic palletizer for mixed pallets.[1] Here's an entire automated distribution center.[2] This is more traditional automation. Pallets come in, are broken apart, and items put into storage. Then items are assembled to fill orders, and stacked on pallets. They even call it "automated Tetris". They try to stack the items to match a retail store's planogram, so the people doing shelf restocking usually have what they need next on top. Objects are lifted from the bottom, or sometimes grabbed from two sides, so they don't rely on super-strong cardboard. The forklifts that empty and fill trucks with pallets are still human-driven in that system. Automated forklifts do exist.[3] They're still rare, though. All this gear seems to come from more advanced countries that don't have an underclass for cheap labor. New Zealand, Germany, the Scandinavian countries. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtH19n3CzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtH19n3CzE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB9T-I7Fh7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB9T-I7Fh7U [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxEEmukZ4R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxEEmukZ4R4