Tag: robotics

Robotics in India

amazing progress on logistics automation

“Chickpet is one of the oldest bazaars in Bangalore, dating back to the 16th century.” “A truck had backed up against a wide shopfloor, where packages were being unloaded and carried to a beltway. Scanners automatically read the barcodes and tagged the packages by type, weight, and destination. Further along, metal arms shot out and swept packets off the belt into bins.”

“All this was manual until recently at this courier company’s warehouse. Now, robotic sorters do the job. Who could have imagined robo workers in a Chickpet bazaar teeming with people?”

“But the robots have increased the capacity for processing consignments tenfold for the DTDC warehouse, and it’s far more accurate too, the processing manager, Bhupathi Anand, points out to me. Human errors in labeling and routing are costly for a courier company.”

“The robots come from Gurgaon-based GreyOrange, a rare hardware success story from India.”

Moon Express

Our Moon Express family of flexible, scalable robotic explorers are capable of reaching the Moon and other solar system destinations from Earth orbit.

this is very well done, as far as ambitious videos go. this company is arguably going to get to the prize before spacex. they’ve just received permission to land on the moon (from the us, which planted it’s flag there first): Press Kit

Robot delivery

Amazon, which currently charges a $99 annual fee for 2-day deliveries under its “Prime” service, will eventually offer 2-tier pricing for delivery services. One will be a “Gold Prime” membership costing $199 to $249 a year that covers next-day deliveries, the other a platinum membership for $399 a year that includes same-day deliveries.

2019-08-20: Starship Technologies

The company has made over 100K commercial deliveries. The total funding has reached $85M. Parcels, groceries and food are directly delivered from stores, at the time that the customer requests via a mobile app. Once ordered the robots’ entire journey and location can be monitored on a smartphone. Starship delivery bots use machine learning to detect objects and do not use expensive LIDAR. Starship robots mostly drive on sidewalks and cross streets when they need to. This poses a different set of challenges compared to self-driving cars. Traffic on car roads is more structured and predictable.

2021-01-27: 1m now:

Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the sidewalk. In addition to sidewalks, the robots are also doing 50K street crossings per day.

This might seem mundane, but both sidewalks and bike lanes are a huge opportunity. Even Amazon realized this, and is using both for last km delivery.

Monkey Grief

You can see how the relationship grows between the real Langur monkeys and the robot monkey in the video below. First, they’re curious about the motionless spy. Then, they include it in their herd. Then, they even want to start babysitting the fake baby robot and take care of it. And finally, when it falls off the tree branch, the monkeys all grieve for it like they would if their own babies died.