AI Helps Warehouse Robots Pick Up New Tricks

Some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, including two godfathers of the machine learning boom, are betting that clever algorithms are about to transform the abilities of industrial robots. Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, who shared this year's Turing Prize with Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, are among the AI luminaries who have invested in Covariant.ai, The company, emerging from stealth Wednesday, announced the first commercial installations of its AI-equipped robots: picking boxes and bags of products for a German electronics retailer called Obeta. Picking up everyday boxes and plastic packages might sound trivial, and it is for most humans. Workers in factories and warehouses are frequently given new objects to handle, or a batch of different items mixed together, but it's deceptively difficult for a machine to quickly work out how to grab the next doodad.