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209 points Luc | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.273s | source
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omneity ◴[] No.43935797[source]
Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear.

The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28

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immibis ◴[] No.43936751[source]
This feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?
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1. withinboredom ◴[] No.43937486[source]
From working on warehouse picking software way before there were robots ... it's because humans. It would take longer for a human to find space in the right space -- or instead, be lazy and forcibly put an item in a space it barely fits -- than to simply dump it into an arbitrary box with enough space and record the box. Then when deciding the path for the picker to pick items from, there's a high chance one of the purchased items is actually nearby other purchased items.