10 ms·

Amazon’s Quest for the ‘Holy Grail’ of Robotics

53 points by wallflower 4y ago

jlund-molfese 4y ago
https://archive.ph/me55a https://archive.ph/me55a
luc_ 4y ago
This is not and should not be touted as the "holy grail of robotics".
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  Human level hand dexterity certainly is a holy grail.
  - robg 4y ago
    Dexterity without sight or sensation is pretty useless. Try finding a quarter in pocket full of change with gloves on.
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      Then add sight and sensation ... who said you couldn't do that?
    - dmix 4y ago
      The innovation of Sparrow is the computer vision combined with the hand. Not just the hand. That wasn’t explained well in the article.
      - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
        Visual servoing and 'eye-in-hand' are not really groundbreaking in robotics, is there some novel/inventive aspect that Sparrow brings? Or is it just taking existing tech and applying it in a real warehouse.
  - luc_ 4y ago
    From a technical perspective, sure. How Amazon is using this? Nah.
- taeric 4y ago
  Would be great if you expanded on what should be touted as such, then? My take is that you should read "holy grail" as a directional claim. That is, not something that can ever be obtained, and as we get closer to the current holder of that vision, expect/demand that it will change.
mabbo 4y ago
I spent a number of years working on software at Amazon in the Picking and storage space. This truly is the Holy Grail in the sense that I'm not actually sure what they want is possible/real. There is a trade-off between storage density and ease of picking. This is true for humans as well as robots. An example: Open a drawer in your kitchen. If it's full as possible in an unorganized fashion, you'll often struggle to even locate the item you're looking for. And once you find it, you need to carefully move other items around to get it out. Now, empty that drawer and put back 1/3 of the items, carefully organized. Now you can find and grab anything quickly! Even a robot could! ... But you need 3 times as many drawers in your kitchen. Your messy kitchen drawer is a pretty close parallel to a typical Amazon storage bin. Set aside the question of robot speed (they're slow), the real question is how much less storage density is needed for the robot to function. Giving up storage density means a smaller selection in each warehouse, which increases shipping costs- the item you want isn't as near to you anymore- or it demands a lot more warehouses, which are expensive to build and operate. Shipping costs dominate their overall cost to get you what you ordered. Fully automating picking at the cost of reduced storage density is a net loss.
- arcbyte 4y ago
  This is very insightful! Surely there's capacity to double or even triple the number of storage bins in existing warehouses by expanding vertically. Humans are limited to 6 ft but robots have no vertical limit. In the future, warehouses could be as tall as skyscrapers with full vertical pickability.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    For sure. You can also cut heat and AC a lot in a robot warehouse. Meaning even if it was 50% more square feet for the same stuff, it should be a lot cheaper to operate,
    - L_Rahman 4y ago
      If you think humans are heat and humidity sensitive for their productivity, I have some news for you about robot servos.
black_13 4y ago
dmix 4y ago
The raw video that was released of Sparrow https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8 https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8 Interestingly they said the computer vision only matches 65% of Amazons product inventory (at the moment). I wonder if they can still deploy it on certain lines where the order’s products 100% fall into the 65% bucket and route the rest to human lines. Or let the robots sort first before passing only unfinished ones to humans? I’m also curious which products it can’t recognize. Probably a lot of small loose items.
- Animats 4y ago
  Oh, that's how Sparrow works. The end effector is 7 vacuum cups arranged in a filled hexagon, each individually retractable. So they can use one for a small object, three or five for a linear object, and all seven for a big object. That's novel. It's also a simple mechanism that can probably run for a long time without problems. It's limited to things you can grab with vacuum, of course. Amazon used to have a "robot picking challenge". Here's the MIT team's video from 2017.[1] That's able to deal with a more confused input bin. They had both a vacuum picker and a gripper. The gripper looks too fragile for a production environment. Unstructured bin picking remains a very hard problem. I first saw a demo in the early 1980s, where a robot at a Detroit automation show was picking Magic Markers from a bin to give to visitors. Improvement since then is far less than you'd expect. Here's a reasonably good demo from 2019.[2] As I point out occasionally, we're still having trouble getting to squirrel-level AI. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fG7zwGfIkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fG7zwGfIkI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxd5-ZD9XcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxd5-ZD9XcQ
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  I'm curious why it's designed to hold the object in front of a rather distant camera for several seconds in order to identify it, instead of mounting a camera on the vacuum arm itself so that it can observe the object as it approaches. The face it grabs tends to be the biggest and contain the product label so you'd also be able to get a better look at the object.
  - dmix 4y ago
Jun8 4y ago
Note that this is just Amazon demonstrating a prototype in their Innovation Center. I take it to be a mostly PR move showing “thought leadership.” Replicating the functionality of the human hand is notoriously hard, although it has been tried many times before by many companies, AFAIK there has been no great success. The push for automation currently is not about replacing workers and cutting costs (although, of course, those are desirable): there’s tremendous churn in all warehouse roles so much so that most companies are hard pressed to find workers. Many new hires quit during the two week training programs.
fredsmith219 4y ago
Couldn’t care less. When they have a robot that will clean my house, do my dishes and laundry, mow my lawn and remove snow, call me. I would spend thousands for a robot like that.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  A Roomba + dishwasher + washer/dryer set + mower-bot[1] + snowblower-bot[2] all already exist and do add up to thousands. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers [2] https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/robot-snow-blower-24-10-2019/ https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/robot-snow-blower-24-10-2019/
  - shard972 4y ago
- wombatpm 4y ago
  It starts with a spouse to create children who do those tasks. The challenge is to space them appropriately to maximize your return on investment. It starts at thousands a year and eventually consumes at least half of your net worth
- imtringued 4y ago
  Such a robot would cost at least twice as much as the average pickup truck sold in the US, not measly thousands.
amazon_illegal 4y ago

53 points by wallflower 4y ago

jlund-molfese 4y ago

https://archive.ph/me55a https://archive.ph/me55a

luc_ 4y ago

This is not and should not be touted as the "holy grail of robotics".

sigmoid10 4y ago
Human level hand dexterity certainly is a holy grail.
- robg 4y ago
  Dexterity without sight or sensation is pretty useless. Try finding a quarter in pocket full of change with gloves on.
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Then add sight and sensation ... who said you couldn't do that?
  - dmix 4y ago
    The innovation of Sparrow is the computer vision combined with the hand. Not just the hand. That wasn’t explained well in the article.
    - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
      Visual servoing and 'eye-in-hand' are not really groundbreaking in robotics, is there some novel/inventive aspect that Sparrow brings? Or is it just taking existing tech and applying it in a real warehouse.
- luc_ 4y ago
  From a technical perspective, sure. How Amazon is using this? Nah.
taeric 4y ago
Would be great if you expanded on what should be touted as such, then? My take is that you should read "holy grail" as a directional claim. That is, not something that can ever be obtained, and as we get closer to the current holder of that vision, expect/demand that it will change.

mabbo 4y ago

I spent a number of years working on software at Amazon in the Picking and storage space. This truly is the Holy Grail in the sense that I'm not actually sure what they want is possible/real. There is a trade-off between storage density and ease of picking. This is true for humans as well as robots. An example: Open a drawer in your kitchen. If it's full as possible in an unorganized fashion, you'll often struggle to even locate the item you're looking for. And once you find it, you need to carefully move other items around to get it out. Now, empty that drawer and put back 1/3 of the items, carefully organized. Now you can find and grab anything quickly! Even a robot could! ... But you need 3 times as many drawers in your kitchen. Your messy kitchen drawer is a pretty close parallel to a typical Amazon storage bin. Set aside the question of robot speed (they're slow), the real question is how much less storage density is needed for the robot to function. Giving up storage density means a smaller selection in each warehouse, which increases shipping costs- the item you want isn't as near to you anymore- or it demands a lot more warehouses, which are expensive to build and operate. Shipping costs dominate their overall cost to get you what you ordered. Fully automating picking at the cost of reduced storage density is a net loss.

arcbyte 4y ago
This is very insightful! Surely there's capacity to double or even triple the number of storage bins in existing warehouses by expanding vertically. Humans are limited to 6 ft but robots have no vertical limit. In the future, warehouses could be as tall as skyscrapers with full vertical pickability.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  For sure. You can also cut heat and AC a lot in a robot warehouse. Meaning even if it was 50% more square feet for the same stuff, it should be a lot cheaper to operate,
  - L_Rahman 4y ago
    If you think humans are heat and humidity sensitive for their productivity, I have some news for you about robot servos.

black_13 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

The raw video that was released of Sparrow https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8 https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8 Interestingly they said the computer vision only matches 65% of Amazons product inventory (at the moment). I wonder if they can still deploy it on certain lines where the order’s products 100% fall into the 65% bucket and route the rest to human lines. Or let the robots sort first before passing only unfinished ones to humans? I’m also curious which products it can’t recognize. Probably a lot of small loose items.

Animats 4y ago
Oh, that's how Sparrow works. The end effector is 7 vacuum cups arranged in a filled hexagon, each individually retractable. So they can use one for a small object, three or five for a linear object, and all seven for a big object. That's novel. It's also a simple mechanism that can probably run for a long time without problems. It's limited to things you can grab with vacuum, of course. Amazon used to have a "robot picking challenge". Here's the MIT team's video from 2017.[1] That's able to deal with a more confused input bin. They had both a vacuum picker and a gripper. The gripper looks too fragile for a production environment. Unstructured bin picking remains a very hard problem. I first saw a demo in the early 1980s, where a robot at a Detroit automation show was picking Magic Markers from a bin to give to visitors. Improvement since then is far less than you'd expect. Here's a reasonably good demo from 2019.[2] As I point out occasionally, we're still having trouble getting to squirrel-level AI. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fG7zwGfIkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fG7zwGfIkI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxd5-ZD9XcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxd5-ZD9XcQ
bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
I'm curious why it's designed to hold the object in front of a rather distant camera for several seconds in order to identify it, instead of mounting a camera on the vacuum arm itself so that it can observe the object as it approaches. The face it grabs tends to be the biggest and contain the product label so you'd also be able to get a better look at the object.
- dmix 4y ago

Jun8 4y ago

Note that this is just Amazon demonstrating a prototype in their Innovation Center. I take it to be a mostly PR move showing “thought leadership.” Replicating the functionality of the human hand is notoriously hard, although it has been tried many times before by many companies, AFAIK there has been no great success. The push for automation currently is not about replacing workers and cutting costs (although, of course, those are desirable): there’s tremendous churn in all warehouse roles so much so that most companies are hard pressed to find workers. Many new hires quit during the two week training programs.

fredsmith219 4y ago

Couldn’t care less. When they have a robot that will clean my house, do my dishes and laundry, mow my lawn and remove snow, call me. I would spend thousands for a robot like that.

tbrownaw 4y ago
A Roomba + dishwasher + washer/dryer set + mower-bot[1] + snowblower-bot[2] all already exist and do add up to thousands. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers [2] https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/robot-snow-blower-24-10-2019/ https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/robot-snow-blower-24-10-2019/
- shard972 4y ago
wombatpm 4y ago
It starts with a spouse to create children who do those tasks. The challenge is to space them appropriately to maximize your return on investment. It starts at thousands a year and eventually consumes at least half of your net worth
imtringued 4y ago
Such a robot would cost at least twice as much as the average pickup truck sold in the US, not measly thousands.

amazon_illegal 4y ago