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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

#61

Post by spieswl »

Another HN roboticist chiming in; the videos look good! I have many questions, but will keep it to just a couple for brevity's sake.

- How much are you able to use the robot's internals to estimate the gripped bag's inertial properties? If you're trying to put rigid, heavy bags below light, amorphous bags, are you adjusting final placement location on-the-fly?

- How dynamic is your scene beyond what we can observe? If you're using light curtains with a single robot on a track, and you're able to estimate some rough geometry of and track the bags down the conveyance, and you are updating occupancy of the bin as you're going, what else is there?

- Is this just inside for the foreseeable future or are you all going to tackle unpacking outside, as well as all the, ahem, baggage that comes along with operating outside the terminal walls.

Nice and straightforward problem, relatively speaking.

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

#62

Post by wavesounds »

klausa wrote: post #56
rokhayakebe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like someone needs to invent a rack that can easily change size based on the plane being loaded

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

#64

Post by justmarc »

dmillard wrote: post #29
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 interne…

There should be a fully fledged, robust and comprehensive open source robotics OS.

I imagine most of this code being reinvented on a daily basis at countless companies around the world, what a waste of human resources.

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

#65

Post by contingencies »

dmillard wrote: post #14
jackcampanella wrote: post #11

Please 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!

Bopomofo @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo Bagel Banjo Baxter Bastian Barry Barnaby Babu Barney Basil Brangelina Balzac Baudilaire Batiste Baldric Bacchus Barrington Ballard Barney Bartosh Bartek Bart

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

#66

Post by fakedang »

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…

Many airports have solved the irregular items problem by simply stipulating that items must be cubical/cuboidal/close enough in shape.

Miss the days when my parents took a kitchen sink from Dubai to India, or when my uncle took coconut saplings and a literal banana tree to the US lol.

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

#67

Post by globalise83 »

dymk wrote: post #60
derektank wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many people will be put out of a low-skilled manual job, but many better-paid jobs are created for robot salespeople, robot installers, training specialists, delivery drivers, maintenance technicians etc. Those who adapt to these new jobs will thrive.

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

#69

Post by michaelt »

btbuildem wrote: post #13

The 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 mo…

Suction cups are way better than multi-finger grippers.

Multi-finger grippers rely on "affordances" i.e. space between the boxes to get the fingers in. If the boxes are pushed up against one another, you've got to do something to make space for the fingers first. So to grab a box with a multi-finger gripper you need space at the top, left and right.

Suction cups, on the other hand? They only need access to the top. No need for space at the left and right, no need to slide things to make space, just apply the suction cup and pull upwards.

Suction cups can also be made of soft, flexible rubber so if the planning is a bit inaccurate? No problem, the suction cup just bends. A multi-finger gripper, though? If the fingers are rigid and strong enough to lift a 30kg bag then they're also probably rigid and strong enough to punch a hole in an adjacent bag.

Suction cups do have a bunch of disadvantages, of course. Porous materials you can't get a seal on. Vacuuming up detritus and messing up your vacuum generator. The payload swinging about on the flexible suction cup. Losing vacuum and dropping the load if there's a power cut.

But they're certainly a great starting point in an application like this one.

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

#70

Post by bombcar »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #55
AustinGrandt wrote: post #5

Previous 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?

Weight of the rack is "wasted weight" on the flight, and that costs money.

Each plane is different, so the racks either waste space or have to have tons of different ones.

Many planes don't have easy big doors for racks (the ones you've probably seen are for designated cargo jets - like this: https://www.aircargo.ups.com/media/Containers-Pallets/upsair... )

And now even if you solve all the above, you still have to load the bags into the rack.

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