
Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses - rmason
https://www.wired.com/story/grasping-robots-compete-to-rule-amazons-warehouses/
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haburka
I love how bad robots are at picking stuff up. It's amazing how far science
has advanced but the act of picking something up that hasn't been seen before
is almost impossible to do reliably. It really helps illustrate how AI is
really not as powerful as people think it is.

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jacquesm
It's incredible how versatile our hands are. Simple pressure, two jawed chuck,
three jawed chuck, four jawed chuck, roundgrip, tweezer grip, scoop and all
that in a tiny, totally quiet package with force feedback across the whole
surface.

Mimicking that mechanically is a major challenge, it has nothing to do with AI
per se.

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Govindae
I've seen AI learn to walk in simulation, I've never seen one learn to tie a
shoe.

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digi_owl
Because the developers have never seen the need...

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tnecniv
That's not quite right. Both of those problems are actually pretty related and
very active areas of research in academia.

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goatlover
It's interesting because the AI founders like McCarthy considered the
intellectual challenges to be hard, and the robot challenges to be relatively
easy.

They would have probably been really surprised that we'd have a superhuman Go
player before we had a robot that was just average at picking up arbitrary
items.

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digi_owl
Humanity seems to underestimate the mental activity needed for limb control
because so much of it is subconscious.

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gozur88
I believe that. It takes, what four or five years for a kid to learn how to
catch a ball?

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gumby
A good part of that is that the kid's nervous system is continually being
detuned due to growth. Consider that dog learns how to catch a ball reliably
once it has reached full size.

Interestingly the myelin sheath around your peripheral nerves thins as you
grow. I have always assumed this is to reduce capacitance so that signal
propagation time between (say) your fingertips and brain remains roughly
constant as your arm gets longer. I don't know if anyone has ever studied this
though.

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joeyo
You may be right that thinning during maturation could serve a purpose, but if
so you have the effect backwards: thinner myelin should mean higher
capacitance (C ~ A/d) and slower conduction velocity. One would expect, if
anything, that the myelin would need to get thicker as the limb lengthens.
Perhaps nerve fiber diameter also increases with maturation---which also
results in faster conduction velocity---and the myelin sheath thins to
compensate.

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gumby
Sorry that was a brain fart -- I meant to type thicken.

Myelination continues Into adulthood btw -- you can see a change in the
distribution of white matter due to learning a new language for example.

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robotresearcher
Grasping Robots Compete to [be minimally competent at picking stuff up and
after many years trying are still hilariously bad compared to the humans that]
Rule Amazon's Warehouses.

They are getting better these days, but let's not get too breathless about it.
That headline is very misleading.

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danesparza
I don't go for reality TV. But this would be a reality TV show I would watch:
Competing to be the robots in Amazon's warehouses.

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saosebastiao
I find it interesting that they try so hard to eliminate warehouse workers,
all the while making structural and capital decisions that ultimately increase
inventory, shipping, planning, procurement, split shipment, and reverse
logistics costs...all of which add up to way more of a cost problem than the
handful of cents per unit of warehouse processing costs. Amazon's cost
problems have almost nothing to do with warehouse workers and everything to do
with management and their inability to comprehend the consequences of their
rash decisions. And because their capital plan is consumed by these bad
decisions, they are quite literally locking them into place.

I'm increasingly convinced that amazon has opened themselves up to competition
on simultaneous price and performance fronts, even with relatively few robots
and a unionized and well paid work force. A few key structural decisions made
up front by intelligent and informed people will make all the difference.

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grapeshot
20 cents per item just to pick it out of a bin and pack it in a box has to be
a significant chunk out of the profit Amazon can make from those smaller low
value items that people order individually with Prime.

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saosebastiao
Significant in the sense that flea bites still hurt even after a shark has
taken your leg off.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932427)

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thaumasiotes
I wish flea bites hurt. Human-biting fleas would quickly go extinct.

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Animats
It's amazing how bad robot manipulation is in unstructured environments. It
hasn't improved a lot in 40 years. There's was a DARPA manipulation challenge
in 2012.[1] Simple manipulation is slow and clunky, even with really good
robot hands.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU)

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haberdasher
It'd be pretty amazing for Google X to participate. They're good at getting
robots to pick things up.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8zKZLqkfII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8zKZLqkfII)

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amelius
What kind of neural network setup would be suitable for this kind of problem?

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SpikeDad
'Send someone with a gurney. We've got a robot hand grasping a man's penis out
here".

