Kinema Systems De-Stealths, Demos Deft Depalletizer

Today, Kinema Systems, a robotics startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., is coming out of stealth mode to announce Kinema Pick, which is "the world's first self-training, self-calibrating software solution for robotic depalletizing." I know, it sounds a little dry, but they have a convincingly cool demo, and we have lots of details on how the system works (and why it's important) from Kinema co-founder and CEO Sachin Chitta. Depalletizing is the task of picking up boxes of stuff off of shipping pallets and doing something with them. If this sounds like a task that should be easy and useful to automate with an industrial robot arm, that's because it is, with the caveat that it's only easy if you get the same pallets with the same boxes on them over and over again. E-commerce companies are getting pallets with all kinds of random boxes tightly jammed on there however they'll fit, which is too much variability for most robots to handle.