Warehouse robots upgraded to make packing decisions 350 times faster

Pick-and-place robotic arms for packing boxes in warehouses can now work more than 350 times faster because of a neural network that predicts how quickly they can safely transport items. The coronavirus pandemic has led to a surge in online shopping. "Vendors are having a very difficult time meeting the demand," says Ken Goldberg at the University of California, Berkeley. Goldberg's lab has previously produced software that improves the grasping ability of a type of robotic arm often deployed in warehouses, using computer vision to identify where in three-dimensional space an object to be grasped is relative to the robot's claw. "Now the bottleneck has moved over to the motion side of things, when the object is in the grasp," says Jeffrey Ichnowski, also at Berkeley.