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Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

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Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#31

Post by protonfish »

sspiff wrote: post #6
protonfish wrote: post #5

I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles. Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I can't think of what would be appropr…

I hope this leads to the revival the use of the truly awesome word "automaton" for autonomous robots!

Cool. I would have preferred "android" but Google's smartphones ruined that.

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#32

Post by SpeciesInvader »

jjjensen90 wrote: post #29
patja wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach robotics to students age 11 - 14. We have settled on the definition that a robot must do three things: sense, think, act. First thing I do is take away all of the remote controls and tell them they have to program it. I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated" portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall into the trap of treating it all like a…

How and where did you get this job? It sounds like my dream job

In Chicago there's a robot store always looking for teachers to help students about that age range (maybe even younger). Can't remember details, but if your city has a robotics store, chances are they can help you get into teaching.

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#33

Post by eat_veggies »

patja wrote: post #27
protonfish wrote: post #5

I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles. Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I can't think of what would be appropr…

I teach robotics to students age 11 - 14. We have settled on the definition that a robot must do three things: sense, think, act. First thing I do is take away all of the remote controls and tell them they have to program it. I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated" portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall into the trap of treating it all like a…

I don't remember FLL having a teleop mode. Back when I did it, it was fully autonomous, but things may have changed since then.

However, FTC, supposedly the grown up version of FLL, had both teleop and autonomous, and with the way it was scored, all you really needed was a solid teleop to crush regional competitions, so we ended up doing way less programming than in middle school FLL. I believe VEX worked the same way, but I only did it one year, so my memory of it is fuzzy.

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#34

Post by ProAm »

dogruck wrote: post #2

Genuine question — is $70 million, spread across +4 different competing companies, a lot of money, for an industry like robot makers? Or, said another way, if the article had said the companies collectively raised $700 million, I don’t think I would’ve been surprised. Can someone provide context?

I think most companies don't expect to burn cash in needless ways that most startups are expected. It's very possible to take what many consider a sizable investment and use it to continue development of an actual product. Where as most startups take money like this, make spaghetti, throw it at the wall and see what sticks.

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#35

Post by username223 »

simias wrote: post #28
username223 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans have better things to do than grueling warehouse jobs. Sadly, they also need to eat, and the only way they can do so now is by doing soul- and body-crushing work at Amazon "fulfillment centers."

I'm personally of the opinion that we must prepare for a society where unskilled jobs don't exist anymore. Evidently they'll be replaced by machines sooner or later. Cashiers, warehouse workers, harvesters... These jobs are soon going to join carriage drivers and lamplighters in history books. That's clearly a big problem for our societies which seem to collapse when unemployment raises. It's also clear that not ever…

> Cashiers, warehouse workers, harvesters...

Paralegals, sports reporters, basic web coders...

> An utopia for some, hell on earth for others.

"We" could farm the "others" for nutrients and trace elements (until "we" become "others" thanks to future automation), or the "others" could kill "us," or the species as a whole could find a different arrangement than trading labor for food. I'm betting on mass extinction followed by thousands of years of bare survival by humans and a small number of similarly cockroach-esque species, but maybe we'll do better.

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#36

Post by pizza234 »

protonfish wrote: post #5

I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles. Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I can't think of what would be appropr…

This question/doubt has very interesting consequences.

An argument against the thesis that "robots" will lead to catastrophic loss of jobs, is that the concept of "robot" in a strict sense (intended as a sudden similarity to human intelligence/capacity) doesn't really exist, because "robots" are simply a form automation - and civilization has been incrementally developing automation for 250 years by now.

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#37

Post by imgabe »

patja wrote: post #27
protonfish wrote: post #5

I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles. Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I can't think of what would be appropr…

I teach robotics to students age 11 - 14. We have settled on the definition that a robot must do three things: sense, think, act. First thing I do is take away all of the remote controls and tell them they have to program it. I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated" portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall into the trap of treating it all like a…

Having worked on some warehouse automation equipment briefly in the past, I'd say they can meet that definition. The equipment I worked on was called a tilt-tray sorter system.

Packages would arrive along a conveyor belt and get put on a tray in a big train of trays (like a roller coaster for boxes).

A scanner would read a bar code on the package (sense).

The bar code would correspond to a particular loading bay where a truck was waiting that the package needed to be put on. (think - match code with loading bay).

When the tray went around and reached the chute for that loading bay it would tilt up and slide the box down to where it could be loaded (act).

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#38

Post by zitterbewegung »

protonfish wrote: post #5

I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles. Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I can't think of what would be appropr…

Since robotics are almost a field of AI it seems like it has inherited the premise that once it has been completed or in production it ceases to be called robotics .

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#39

Post by 52-6F-62 »

eru wrote: post #15
hugs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition, a clothes dryer with a humidity sensor is a robot. (And I'm fine with that!)

My favourite robot is a dishwasher. Mostly because it is so different from what some people naively imagine when you asked them to think of a design for a robot to wash dishes.

I have to try that question on people sometime. Sounds like fun.

Also, reminds me of this:

   Status: Alive
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Amana

Re: Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

#40

Post by blacksmith_tb »

the-dude wrote: post #14
protonfish wrote: post #5

I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles. Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I can't think of what would be appropr…

In South Africa traffic lights are called robots.

Many traffic lights around the world use buried loops of wire as Hall effect sensors (for example, to register when a car is waiting to make a left turn). So that would pass the sense-think-act test, I'd say, even without considering Smart Traffic Lights[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_traffic_light

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