4 ms·

How can self-driving cars handle going down the road at 70mph, yet bin-picker robots have to move so slowly to be accurate? Seems like a contradiction to me.

• saosebastiao 11y ago
  It comes down to path planning degrees of freedom and dimensionality. Cars have two degrees of freedom and two dimensions, where most of these robots use 6 degrees of freedom in 3 dimensions.
  • ck2 11y ago
    Could it be accelerated with massive amounts of computing power? Is the limitation here sensor speed or computing speed? Certainly not motor speed, I see once the robot determines what to do, it immediately moves much more quickly.
• genericuser 11y ago
  Well just off the top of my head bin-pickers probably need to have millimeter accuracy when grabbing something so as to get close enough to suction it and not stab through it. Cars on the other hand are not functioning at that level of precision when traveling 70 mph, they are probably not even using that level of precision when parking, and they do not park at 70 mph.
• Igglyboo 11y ago
  A bin-picker robot needs to be accurate on the scale of a few millimeters while a car is probably fine with a few hundred centimeters of accuracy.
  • robotresearcher 11y ago
    Think about that again. A few meters of accuracy is not going to drive down a lane safely, let alone park, negotiate an intersection, or pass a cyclist in traffic. A handful of centimeters, not a few hundred.
• johansch 11y ago
  Perhaps sub-par mechanics is a factor. When building some robot arms I've discovered it's relatively hard to combine speed, precision and power. Here's a demo of speed and accuracy using standard industrial robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR-YlZ9NdIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR-YlZ9NdIA
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  They don't. It is a convergence problem. If you've ever seen a pick-and-place robot in a factor you know they can be quite fast. Simply put, the convergence problem is getting to the correct orientation and position to positively pick up an item. Factory robots finesse that by putting parts in a narrow area in the work space but modern car assembly robots can pull parts in a wide variety of orientations and positions. Current research has focused on visual systems as it is pretty cheap these days to put a couple of cameras near the end effector to provide a stereoscopic view to the effector converging on the target.
  • nulltype 11y ago
    Here's a pretty sweet pick and place robot for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHpDDttIBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHpDDttIBU
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Drives me nuts to look at it for too long. And it looks like a spider.
    • dankohn1 11y ago
      That reminds me of the famous Lucille Ball chocolate scene [0], except in this case the robot is keeping up just fine! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
• noonespecial 11y ago
  When you're playing golf, why don't you use your 3 wood on the green?
• michaelt 11y ago
  In robotics, a lot of speed problems can be solved by spending more money on a bigger arm with better acceleration and backlash characteristics, reducing vibration by bolting it down to a stronger bit of floor, making your vision system less blurry by adding more and brighter lighting, avoiding people hitting their heads with a proper guarding system, and possibly throwing more CPU at your processing problem. These issues are all eminently solvable, but the solutions take time and make the system harder to work on and more expensive, without generating a contribution to knowledge or academic papers. Better to have a slow system you can transport to demonstrations than a fast system bolted to a lab floor that you can't demo anywhere :)