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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

#21

Post by dmillard »

riobard wrote: post #7

Are most suitcases designed to bear its fully loaded weight just by sucking on one surface?

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. We're moving away from pure suction partly for this reason and partly for textiles.

Suction is great though, and ~75% of bags checked through the US are hardshells, so it's something we're not ready to ignore entirely.

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#23

Post by hemloc_io »

> Unfortunately for airlines, passengers don’t package their luggage in nicely uniform cardboard boxes. If they did, then the airlines could benefit directly from the recent takeoff in manipulator tech for warehouses. But airline luggage is way more wacky and irregular. If robots are going to handle it, they need to reason about how to grasp each item, handle its deformability, stack it in a stable way, and do all of this quickly, safely, and reliably.

Curious if you guys have put any thought into seeing if there's an operational change you could introduce to airlines, that would result in the tech side being a lot easier?

Palletizing logistics for consumer airtravel would be interesting...

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#24

Post by dmillard »

Animats wrote: post #10

This is much like a palletizer. Here's a mixed-case cage palletizer, which fills up wire cages open on one side with various boxes.[1] For rectangular boxes, palletizing is a solved problem with many companies selling systems. Irregular items are a problem. In the baggage handling video, the last bag, the soft one with straps, is sticking out after being placed in the baggage container. That's the same problem which…

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 world into the aviation world. We're very interesting in looking the other direction, though!

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#26

Post by floren »

pj_mukh wrote: post #2

Super cool! You are additionally going to be saving a lot of workers from getting chronic back pains. I thought maybe y'all are going too slow, but after looking at some baggage handling videos, it seems like you're at a comparable speed already? In deployment these things are probably going to be on some kind of cart system, I presume all your algorithms can handle small changes in the XY travel plane (i.e. the robo…

> You are additionally going to be saving a lot of workers from getting chronic back pains.

That'll probably be a big comfort to those who lose their jobs

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#27

Post by dmillard »

hemloc_io wrote: post #23

> Unfortunately for airlines, passengers don’t package their luggage in nicely uniform cardboard boxes. If they did, then the airlines could benefit directly from the recent takeoff in manipulator tech for warehouses. But airline luggage is way more wacky and irregular. If robots are going to handle it, they need to reason about how to grasp each item, handle its deformability, stack it in a stable way, and do all of…

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, good perception and reactive planning) really unlocks this ability from the robotics side.

For widebody planes, bags are already loaded into Unit Load Devices (ULDs), which are large semi-truncated boxes that get loaded directly onto aircraft. Narrow body planes don't use these (apparently) because they impact turn-time and decrease the amount of time a plane can be in the air, and also impacts how quickly bags come out, since it adds an extra step to unloading.

Many airport conveyance systems also load each bag into a bin, but those bins aren't loaded into the airplane because they belong to the airport and waste space/weight.

The best case for us would be a customer process change where everyone loads their luggage into perfectly regular and very sturdy hardshells, but this one's probably out of our hands.

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#28

Post by pj_mukh »

floren wrote: post #26
pj_mukh wrote: post #2

Super cool! You are additionally going to be saving a lot of workers from getting chronic back pains. I thought maybe y'all are going too slow, but after looking at some baggage handling videos, it seems like you're at a comparable speed already? In deployment these things are probably going to be on some kind of cart system, I presume all your algorithms can handle small changes in the XY travel plane (i.e. the robo…

> You are additionally going to be saving a lot of workers from getting chronic back pains. That'll probably be a big comfort to those who lose their jobs

That's not how this works. Most airports are looking to expand, they can keep the same staffing levels with a rapid expansion in throughput with these machines. (Assuming the unions allow it).

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#29

Post by dmillard »

chfritz wrote: post #22

I've heard about you guys before. Nice application! What are you using for teleop/remote-monitoring? Did you build that yourself?

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 rendering and then throw all of our sensor data into it - it's very performant and low latency!

We've since introduced a message-bus layer that makes it possible to do it all over the internet etc, but adds the associated serialization and transport latency.

Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports

#30

Post by ztratar »

dmillard wrote: post #19
bufferoverflow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

I guess, just my opinion (probably worthless), if you can get it to speed up even ~20%, I think that would be enough to make the average person agree.
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