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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

(spectrum.ieee.org)
209 points Luc | 1 comments | 09 May 25 11:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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omneity ◴[09 May 25 11:53 UTC] 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 ◴[09 May 25 13:51 UTC] 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. kevin_thibedeau ◴[09 May 25 15:50 UTC] No.43938177[source]▶
The Kiva warehouses deliver the pods to human pickers at fixed stations. The humans just have to retrieve the product from the indicated bin without roaming the warehouse. The storage area for the pods is kept maximally packed without any aisles since the robots have their grid to operate in underneath.