Hitachi warehouse robot grabs goods with two arms

In another sign that more warehouse workers could be displaced by machines, Hitachi has created a mobile logistics robot that can use two arms to handle inventory. Developed to meet increasing demand from online shopping orders, the machine can move around on wheels, autonomously fetching merchandise and carrying it to a shipping container. Because its arms can hold objects of many different shapes and sizes, the robot could be used to replace human staff doing repetitive picking work in high mix, low volume warehouses, where it would not be cost-effective to use dedicated robots for each different product. Hitachi has developed an autonomous two-armed robot that can work in warehouses that ship goods for online retailers. For the robot's appendages, Hitachi used two Epson ProSix C4-A901S industrial robot arms, which have six degrees of freedom of movement, and equipped them with cameras that use a computer vision system to recognize merchandise.