Congrats David! I love your approach and your problem space. I'm rooting for you.
Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#52How would a single armed robot handle oversized luggage or luggage with weird centre of mass? Or poorly packed luggage who's centre of mass is shifting?
Say golf club hard shells case where the owner's left a bunch of golf balls in the bottom of one of the pockets. It's difficult to tell that one end's quite a lot heavier then the other until you actually try to pick it up.
At least to me I don't see a good way of handling this edge case. You'd need either a second manipulator, a very fast feedback system, or a way for the weird luggage to be diverted for human intervention.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#53How would a single armed robot handle oversized luggage or luggage with weird centre of mass? Or poorly packed luggage who's centre of mass is shifting? Say golf club hard shells case where the owner's left a bunch of golf balls in the bottom of one of the pockets. It's difficult to tell that one end's quite a lot heavier then the other until you actually try to pick it up. At least to me I don't see a good way of ha…
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 generally this stuff doesn't behave well on conveyor belts.
- Data driven approaches can tell you a lot just from visual information, usually about deformability of objects, but also about expected centers of mass, etc
- Part of the reason we're using single big robots is because you can use heavy duty end-effectors - grasp all the way around the object with a grasp that's predicted to be robust to these kinds of perturbances, and then use quick feedback to safely execute a plan to place it
You're absolutely correct though, that there's a long tail of things coming through and that some objects are very, very difficult. Our problem formulation then becomes identifying confidence in graspability, and deciding explicitly that we shouldn't attempt to grasp some object and should instead flag them for human handling.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#54Congrats David! I love your approach and your problem space. I'm rooting for you.
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/
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#55Previous baggage handler turned software dev here. Looks like you are targeting the bag room right now which is the best spot to start to prove the concept. It was surprising to me how manual the entire loading & sorting process was when I worked for the airlines. I'm curious if there's any roadmap eventually to get this out to the ramp itself. Most of the back injuries seemed to happen in the bin itself because you…
Why don't they just push the loaded rack into the airplane?
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#56Previous baggage handler turned software dev here. Looks like you are targeting the bag room right now which is the best spot to start to prove the concept. It was surprising to me how manual the entire loading & sorting process was when I worked for the airlines. I'm curious if there's any roadmap eventually to get this out to the ramp itself. Most of the back injuries seemed to happen in the bin itself because you…
Why don't they just push the loaded rack into the airplane?
They do for larger planes; but commuter jets and most narrow bodies don’t have enough space in the belly for that.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#57As part of one of my classes in engineering school we went and toured the DIA baggage handling system, studied why and how it was such a big failure and what they did to fix it.
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, particularly in "brownfield" existing processes - our bet is that recent advances in robot autonomy give us ability to handle items that weren't possible before, and therefore our unit…
Very cool, makes sense. Totally, the real challenge in this space is all the weird corner cases.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#58Congrats David & John B! Excited to watch you guys grow.
Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#59Congrats David & John B! Excited to watch you guys grow.
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Re: Launch HN: Azalea Robotics (YC S24) – Baggage-handling robots for airports
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
It's not as though this is a profession which people spend a decade learning to perform. And it's not 2009 any more, there is demand for labor throughout the economy. I think the benefit of getting people out of physically damaging work outweighs the pain of having to find a new job in this case
I don't follow how the existence of these robots is a benefit to the worker. A robot took their job, that does not mean another job was created out of thin air.
I'm not saying this isn't back breaking work, I'm just saying that your logic doesn't make sense.