dmillard

8 ms·

1.
by dmillard 1y ago
Interesting post and great reference to [1] about why laundry hits a sweet spot of capability. Interestingly the repeated critiques in the article are about sensor richness: primarily force feedback and tactility, which indicates lacking ha
2.
by dmillard 1y ago
Clearly not - it's quite funny (or at least I thought so). Anyway, the author is a well known writer in the robotics world.
3.
by dmillard 1y ago
Two of the authors of the original Aurora system left Microsoft to found https://silurian.ai/ - interesting to keep tabs on if you're interested in this space!
4.
by dmillard 2y ago
Thanks, Benjie! Great to see you here. I hope it's OK if I plug your excellent writings on robotics that I think everyone should check out: https://generalrobots.substack.com/
5.
by dmillard 2y ago
Great questions and a few answers to various parts of your question that you've mostly identified yourself I think: - Golf clubs specifically (and most sporting equipment) actually goes down a different pipeline in most airports, since
6.
by dmillard 2y ago
Not a pest at all and I've long been frustrated with ROS - our early demos were actually just a single C++ binary with multiple threads running for perception, control, and visualization, and I byte-packed robot control messages in our
7.
by dmillard 2y ago
There have been some solid attempts in this space before - many projects take on the whole baggage system design and end up very very complex and often over budget. We're focusing on introducing tech that plays well in a larger system,
8.
by dmillard 2y ago
Thanks for the feedback! John B was obviously aware from previous experience what a manual and injury prone process this was, but I've also been really surprised as I've dived deeper into airport operations myself. Bagroom is defi
9.
by dmillard 2y ago
Excellent post! Curious if WebRTC can be adapted for 3d sensor data and would love to chat more about it - I'll send an email!
10.
by dmillard 2y ago
Also good question and something we've thought about. The difficulty there is actually getting the forklift tines out after placement. Actual forklifts in real warehouses rely on pallets as an affordance for manipulation, and we don&#x
11.
by dmillard 2y ago
We're really focused on health and safety aspects of this job - in a repetitive stress sense, these jobs are much more dangerous than many people imagine they would be and people end up with lifelong injuries. Generally, regulators see
12.
by dmillard 2y ago
Suction has gotten us pretty far at the prototype level but definitely isn't enough - we're testing out some new gripper designs that use suction as a broader part of an overall grasping system. For these videos we have lidars and
13.
by dmillard 2y ago
The cup has taken us very far, which we're excited about, but it's definitely not enough - we're currently testing a multimodal claw-ish + suction gripper, which we've had good results with so far but aren't ready t
14.
by dmillard 2y ago
Teleop and monitoring are systems that we've built ourselves and are pretty happy with. Since we use MuJoCo for simulation/visualization and some kinematics subroutines, to visualize, I just keep the MuJoCo GL context open after r
15.
by dmillard 2y ago
Operational changes for airlines are quite tricky - one of our bets is that most of the value for customers here is in handling "brownfield" deployments where you drop into an existing process, and that intelligence (or at least,
16.
by dmillard 2y ago
Yep! We're obviously operating alongside a very well established world of palletization and other order fulfillment type robots. We think that due to irregularity that it's not an easy tech transfer from the existing logistics wor
17.
by dmillard 2y ago
Solid question and something we think about a lot! Worst case is a weak zipper or similar. We're bringing a new gripper online which is more multimodal - some mechanical grasping, some suction, and the ability to choose what you use. W
18.
by dmillard 2y ago
Good video! The overall question here is the blended rate of bags placed per minute, rather than how fast each action needs to be. That said, the arm itself can move 180deg/s in every joint (roughly 5m/s max at the end effector) -
19.
by dmillard 2y ago
There are a lot of constraints in our planning, including what actions we can do for a particular bag/gripper interaction. Multiple robots working in collision range of each other isn't on the roadmap right now, but it's alwa
20.
by dmillard 2y ago
Great point and we 100% agree! We have a new multi-modal gripper that we're testing now but are keeping hush while we bring it up. (We're actually swapping out a new arm too for a variety of reasons) These videos are more to set a
21.
by dmillard 2y ago
No - people keep asking us to name our robots, but we haven't landed on anything yet!
22.
by dmillard 2y ago
Thanks! It's a really destructive job for workers' lower backs and elbow tendons. This actually puts into perspective the blended throughput rate - you can imagine loading a few bags really quickly, but moving 20kg bags for 10 min
23.
Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
132 points by dmillard 2y ago|80 comments