4 ms·

Have you ever been to a modern warehouse? There are hundreds of those things moving around, often with heavy loads (enough to injure if not enough to kill). A

• deleted 3y ago
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• amluto 3y ago
  Read your link: > The drives have enough smarts to move safely around humans, communicate with nearby robots so they do not collide, and report any problems like spills or obstructions back to the controller. The robots are clearly designed to fail safe if they cannot communicate with the central controller. It would be an extremely poor design to have them operate in an unsafe mode in the event of interference in an unlicensed spectrum (or even a licensed spectrum, for that matter).
• parker_mountain 3y ago
  > If there is a factory that allows a worker to step in front of a robot and depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety, something is very very wrong. All of those robots leave enough threshold to avoid collisions with other robots should they need to stop suddenly. The robots do on device calculations and report back their status to the central server to help other robots route around "damage" (stopped robots, for example). Instead, they give the robots general path instructions with enough buffer area to allow the robots to not trigger their own on device collision sensing. In the links that you gave, it's very clear that the robots do not depend on communicating with a central server if a worker steps in front of a robot. By the way, in warehouses without such advanced protection, humans are _absolutely_ banned from the floor and it's treated like any other large industrial scale operation, including fail safes on gates (if gate is open, do not allow restart and human presence sensing (often through a badge of some sort). Failure of this sort would lead to massive liabilities to the warehouse and robot owners. They are heavily incentivized to do things the right way. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's actually quite advanced and safe. And it has been that way for years.
• MR4D 3y ago
  So, perhaps I didn't word my reply as well as I should have. I am very much aware that robots have fail safes and all sorts of graceful failure modes. What I was trying to communicate is that wireless communications is very much used for safety (positioning, allstop type commands, etc). The fail safes are there as a last resort (e.g. someone walking in front of it). Still not sure I'm using the right words to describe my thoughts, so maybe I'm just tired. I appreciate all the feedback, though. Nite.