[ExI] USA Robotics Week 6-14 April

[BillK]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2019 at 17:19, <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
>
> This competition is always great fun, but I can see ways to make it better.
> For instance... These robots are remote control, for perfectly
> understandable reasons: students are on a limited budget and limited
> schedule.  But we could imagine leagues in this sport beyond college, where
> you have the more hardcore hobbyist, with bigger budgets, years to invest,
> contacts to get corporate sponsorships and all that, and make them fully
> autonomous.  We know companies are developing stuff like that, but wouldn't
> it be cool to have amateur clubs competing against each other and maybe
> scare the big dogs?  Or inspire the big dogs?
>

Latest Boston Dynamics warehouse pallet stacking robot - Nice mover!  :)

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns>

Quote:
Boston Dynamics    Published on Mar 28, 2019

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).
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BillK