Please tell me the robot's name is not Iggy.
Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
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Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#12Was on a plane a few days ago watching someone do this out the window 10 yards away.
- Seemed like the baggage handler was required to do a very fast cycle of . Automation seems helpful, and certainly it’s hard labor.
- This was also a young woman, in presumably a safe union job, working in a very pricey city (one of the mountain west towns that exploded). Adios union job hello robots.
Tricky ethics! Outside of picking stuff up and putting stuff down, not too many automation union-safe jobs left. Saving them from back pain is also going to be saving them from a job.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#13The suction "cup" seems to be doing a good job, but I don't think bags are made to be handled that way. Did you alternate test with some kind of a grabber (like the claw machine, but actually effective)? It would make the grasp selection problem much more tractable imo, since all bags have at least one "grasp point" built in.
In teleoperated mode, I'm guessing you're using the captured data to train the autonomous mode?
Final note, the robot looks beefy enough to lift an entire airplane, forget luggage -- is it overengineered on purpose?
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#14Please tell me the robot's name is not Iggy.
No - people keep asking us to name our robots, but we haven't landed on anything yet!
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#15How much faster will the robotic arms be able to go? Currently this looks far too slow, though as a v1 it's great.
It's about as fast as human does it now.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#16call me disappointed. Not to belittle whatever work was put into it as there were probably a lot, just the one-suction-cup way of doing it seems so 30 years ago. These days i'd have expected [several] hands with fingers.
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 scene for where we're operating the the general process.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#17I'm surprised the end effector works on misshapen fabric bags. Makes me jealous that I can't test it. Are you considering dynamic trajectory constraints in the planner (e.g. for multiple robots loading simultaneously)? That was a thorny problem back when I worked on arms.
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 always a possibility.
Suction works really well but it's not enough, we're rolling out a new gripper soon that covers more cases mechanically (there's a very long tail in the distribution of what comes through airports).
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#18This is excellent! I live in a small city with an airport so have known many baggage handlers during my years here. I honestly didn’t believe how common back and shoulder injuries were in the industry. This could prevent a whole lot of medical problems.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's about as fast as human does it now.
Not even close https://youtube.com/shorts/KMlCCyQPfME?si=BsyZ9QZgZDJWVh4f
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) - these videos are still very much v1 and we're looking forward to leveraging more of the mechanical capability with a better gripper, better perception, and some new planning techniques we're rolling out in the next few months.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#20Are most suitcases designed to bear its fully loaded weight just by sucking on one surface?
Another robot to clean up after the zipper fails is wip