Robots are very good at doing prescribed tasks over and over–welding the same joint, for example, or hanging a car door on a manufacturing line. But when you introduce variability, things get a lot more complicated.
That’s the challenge grocery fulfillment giant Ocado faced when trying to design a robot that could pick up every unit in its 50,000 item catalog.
It’s an important hurdle. Object-agnostic picking and placing robots will be necessary to move to truly lights-out autonomous fulfillment warehouses, which is the goal of just about every e-commerce fulfillment company in the post-Amazon world.Currently, much of the picking and […]
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