Channel: Stanford Online

Category: Education

Tags: aa289autonomous systemsrobotics and autonomous systemsautomationlogistics industrystanfordonlineroboticsrobot manipulation

Description: Samir Menon, Robert Sun, and Kunal Shah Dexterity AI April 8, 2022 The past several years have created a perfect storm for the logistics industry: worker shortages, surging ecommerce activity, and many other factors have significantly increased the demand for robot manipulators automating more and more components of logistics and supply chains. This new wave of automation presents a new set of challenges compared to traditional automation tasks, e.g. in manufacturing. Manipulation workloads in the logistics industry involve extreme variability in the objects being handled: their shape, size, dynamics, condition, etc. as well as the sets of objects that must be managed and organized together. Additionally, these manipulators must be plugged into existing workflows and infrastructures that were designed for and still often interface with humans. Meeting this need, Dexterity is a robotics startup that has engineered and deployed robotic systems that can intelligently manipulate tens of thousands of items in production, reason about and operate in dynamic environments, collaborate with each other using the sense of touch, and safely operate in the presence of humans. Dexterity's robots ship hundreds of thousands of units in packaged food and parcel warehouses each day and are in production 24/7. In this talk, we will describe the unique challenges we have encountered in bringing robot manipulation to logistics, including the technical advancements which we have employed to date, spanning engineering disciplines from machine learning, simulation, modeling, algorithms, and control, to robotic hardware & software. We will describe the variety of automation workflows we are executing on which we have found provide the most value to our customers, including palletizing, depalletizing, kitting for fulfillment, and singulation for induction. And we will highlight a number of open problems we have encountered which can motivate future research in the robotics community. View the full playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMeercb-kvGLUrOq4HR6BZD