As far as I know, this is the first robot that Boston Dynamics has actually designed to play a useful and salable role in industry.
From Boston Dynamics (appears under the YouTube on its native page):
Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. 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.
When Handle places a boxes onto a pallet, it uses force control to nestle each box up against its neighbors. The boxes used in the video weigh about 5 Kg (11 lbs), but the robot is designed to handle boxes up to (15 Kg) (33 lb). This version of Handle works with pallets that are 1.2 m deep and 1.7 m tall (48 inches deep and 68 inches tall).
For some reason I visualize a honkin’ big stinger on the bottom of its power system. The motion is very … alien.
6 replies on “The “Handle” robot”
We’ll see. I don’t have a lot of faith in a company that’s been around nearly 30 years and hasn’t produced anything more useful than press releases.
I worked in research all my life. What BD does is basic engineering research, and they are the best in the world at this type of robotics. I’m very happy to see a product designed to solve an industrial problem.
They have not been well-managed in terms of charting a path from sugar-daddy-supported research to a self-supporting business, and have suffered being yanked around by being sold a couple of times.
As you say, we’ll see. But as an engineer, I feel they have done stellar work. High-functioning prototypes are not “press releases”.
I don’t care what the excuses are. Being the best in the world at developing a useless technology isn’t worth much.
Again, we’ll have to disagree. There’s nothing useless here. Palleting and depaletting in ever-changing environments normally employs an illegal “immigrant”. If the price can be gotten down to under $50K, these will sell very well, and I will be very happy to pull the illegal off the teat.
The original “dog” was designed for the military to hump supplies across uneven terrain. If they’d had the battery technology at the time, they would have sold them to both the Army and the Marines in large quantity. It took them ten years to solve the problem of autonomous foot placement and the dynamics of balancing in that environment (hence their name).
Broaden your horizon, man. Space, robotics, and genetic engineering are the three things that will most affect the world over the next 100 years. I would post on the last one, but I am not technically competent enough in that area to feel comfortable doing so. In the other two areas, I have patents.
There’s not the slightest trace of evidence that Handle can operate in an ever-changing environment or that they can sell it for under $50K. All I can tell from the video is that it can operate for a few minutes in a highly controlled environment.
Yeah, if Big Dog had been useful then it would have been useful. So what? Who cares how long it took to solve the foot placement problem when even after that it’s still useless?
Unfortunately my horizons got a little too broad and I started paying attention to more than just the press releases.
It took more than 30 years to perfect the automobile. Who cares? The same could be said for the mobile phone. Sorry, friend, I’m in research. I take a longer view.
The Army was slavering to buy Big Dog, but they couldn’t make it quiet enough. They can, now. If everybody gave up when things are tough, we would be living in caves and starving.