Page 8 - Logistics News Sept/Oct 2017

Feature

In the future, warehouse robots

will learn on their own

By Cade Metz, courtesy New York Times

The robot was perched over a bin fi lled with random objects, from a box of instant oatmeal to a
small toy shark. This two-armed automaton did not recognize any of this stuff, but that did not
matter. It reached into the pile and started picking things up, one after another after another.

The robot at Berkeley can pick up irregular objects it has never seen before, like a toy shark.
Credit Jason LeCras for The New York Times

“IT FIGURES out the best way to grab each distribution centres — where sorting through stuff
object, right from the middle of the clutter,” said is the primary task — armies of humans still do
Jeff Mahler, one of the researchers developing the most of the work.
robot inside a lab at the University of California, The Berkeley robot was all the more
Berkeley. remarkable because it could grab stuff it had
For the typical human, that is an easy task. For never seen before. Mr. Mahler and the rest of the
a robot, it is a remarkable talent — something that Berkeley team trained the machine by showing
could drive signifi cant changes inside some of the it hundreds of purely digital objects, and after
world’s biggest businesses and further shift the that training, it could pick up items that weren’t
market for human labour. represented in its digital data set.
Today, robots play important roles inside “We’re learning from simulated models
retail giants like Amazon and manufacturing and then applying that to real work,” said Ken
companies like Foxconn. But these machines are Goldberg, the Berkeley professor who oversees
programmed for very specifi c tasks, like moving a the university’s automation lab.
particular type of container across a warehouse or The robot was far from perfect, and it could
placing a particular chip on a circuit board. They be several years before it is seen outside research
can’t sort through a big pile of stuff , or accomplish labs. Though it was equipped with a suction cup
more complex tasks. Inside Amazon’s massive or a parallel gripper — a kind of two-fi ngered hand

24 September/October 2017 | Logistics News