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The raw video that was released of Sparrow https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8 https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8 Interestingly they said the computer vision only matches

by 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
  Yeah that seemed odd to me as well. An odd angle and distance but I’m sure they had their reasons

by dmix 4y ago

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
Yeah that seemed odd to me as well. An odd angle and distance but I’m sure they had their reasons