Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

Boston Dynamics puts its wheeled-robot Handle to work in a warehouse

Boston Dynamics deputed Handle two years back. Since then, however, the bipedal wheeled robot has taken a backseat to the rest of the company’s offering. While the ‘bot is no less impressive than the rest of its lineup, Boston Dynamics’ video output has almost exclusively been dedicated to Atlas and Spot/Spot Mini.

Today, however, the robot gets a bit more time to shine — albeit in slightly less glamorous circumstances. A new video offers a better look at the robot’s cargo carrying abilities, this time in a warehouse setting. The initial video showed how the robot was capable of picking up 100 pound crates, and now we’re seeing what it might look like the put the robot to work.

The “reimagined” version of the robot has some clear differences from its predecessor. It appears to be larger and, more strikingly, its twin arms have been replaced by a large, overhead suction cup gripper. This time out, lifts are limited to 30 pounds, though the boxes in the video weigh around 12. Even so, the dexterity, reach and balance of the robots deployed in the video are quite impressive at first glance.

According to the company, “Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. The on-board vision system on Handle tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing.”

Last year at our Berkeley Robotics event, the company announced plans to commercialize Spot Mini. The robot is set for sale later this year, and is part of a new found focus on product monetization that appears to have been been a part of becoming part of a larger organization — first Google, then Softbank.

Of course, this video shouldn’t be taken a definitely sign that the company is moving in that direction, and besides, it’s hard to imagine a robot as advanced as handle not being prohibitively expensive for most warehouse. Still, at a time when most warehouse robots are essentially autonomous carts, there’s something to be said for a fast moving robot capable of actually picking products off of shelves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio
Post a Comment
Read more

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line
Post a Comment
Read more

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem
Post a Comment
Read more