
Robot sorting system helps Chinese company sort 200,000 packages a day - hourislate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QndP_PCRSw&feature=youtu.be
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nitwit005
What's the advantage over just scanning them and having a conveyor belt system
channel it to the right spot?

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panda88888
I think it's flexibility and less fixed infrastructure. You don't have to
build a conveyor belt system to cover a rectangular area. You just need holes
and navigation grid for the robot swarm, and charging docks -- essentially
trading hardware complexity for software complexity.

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grogenaut
You still have to build tons of vertical slots and a ton of floor space for
all of those slots. Also I feel that this thing will start getting a
exponential congestion problem.

The layout from the video:

oox ooo ooo

Which means that you need 9 grids for every one slot. Further, and this is
where a proof would be needed, you'd have the following robot placements:

roxrox rRRrRR rrrrRR roxrox rRRrRR rrrrRR

One robot can move in this case but I'm not sure this is optimal. At this
density I'm betting that you get into exponential moves to move all the way
from 0,0 to 6,6.

If you were more like roxrox orooro rorror roxrox orooro rorror

you could more likely keep channels of movement.

This is similar to a chip routing problem. So that's why you go vertical
planes as well. But you still get limited throughput.

I may have the math wrong (I haven't done it)

EDIT: Ugh, no pre tags, take the ror ooo and line them up vertially on the
breaks.

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Safety1stClyde
There is a person putting the parcels on the robots.

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hourislate
I suspect for now the package has to be placed facing up so an OCR of some
type can scan the address and instruct the robot to a particular shoot to drop
the package. I would expect that eventually the whole process is automated
where the package will drop onto the robot without human intervention.

