Viewing profile — dmillard

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: primar…

Clearly not - it's quite funny (or at least I thought so). Anyway, the author is a well known writer in the robotics world.

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!

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/

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…

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 visuali…

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 …

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 deep…

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!

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 p…

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 e…

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 gr…

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 res…

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 visuali…

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 exis…

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 …

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, …

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 ev…

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 …

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 …

No - people keep asking us to name our robots, but we haven't landed on anything yet!

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 ba…

Hey HN! We’re David and John B, cofounders of Azalea Robotics ( https://www.azalearobotics.com ). We build robots to handle passenger baggage in airports. Here are some videos to g…