Meet The Clever Robot That's Ready to Take On Your Shopping Addiction
Released on 03/01/2018
[Host] This is the result of your
online shopping addiction.
It's a picker robot.
Its job is to sort through goods
in an order fulfillment center.
A task that's traditionally been difficult
for machines.
But that's changing.
Thanks in large part to a mix of AI
and some good old fashioned human hand-holding.
I guarantee you take for granted
how many things you can pick up.
What comes so naturally to you is
difficult for a lot of robots.
But not these picker robots
at a startup called Kindred.
They're able to grab a variety of items
and hold them for a barcode scanner
and file them in the right cubby hole.
The big opportunity in e-commerce
is that there are millions and millions of
different types of objects.
Packaging keeps changing,
some are soft and squishy,
some are hard, some are heavy, some are soft.
And there's no way you can program that.
The challenge for us is
constantly learning all these new objects
fast enough to respond to our customers.
[Host] But fear not.
The robots still need our help
learning how to tackle these new objects.
The team at Kindred lets the robot
try and grasp objects on its own.
This is known as reinforcement learning.
Meaning, it gets a digital thumbs-up
whenever it does something right.
And adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Humans also refine the robot's skills by
remotely piloting the machine.
[Man] The human controller guides the arm and the gripper
to pick up the objects,
and we use all that data from the gripper
from the servers from the arm
to feed our algorithms.
So the next time they see the same shape,
we know how to pick it up.
[Host] This approach provides a flexibility
that's essential in a job like order fulfillment.
Not only does the robot need to know how to
manipulate a galaxy of different objects,
it has to adapt on the fly to
novel products.
So let's say that coats come into season
for a retailer like Gap.
Which is, in fact, testing Kindred's robot.
The machine needs to know how to deal
with that new shape.
[George] As winter arrives and we get new objects
we can start learning of those new objects,
and then when summer comes back,
we might see objects we've used before
and we can switch back to those algorithms
to pick up those objects.
Or we might see a whole new class of objects.
I don't know, maybe
sombreros become popular one summer
and now we need to learn how to pick up sombreros.
[Host] Adaptability is crucial for e-commerce robots.
Or any robot for that matter.
We can't just program the machines to manipulate
each and every one of the dizzying number of objects
in our world.
They'll have to think on their own.
And when that doesn't work,
we have to be prepared to step in and help
until they get the hang of things.
Yes, that'll make us babysitters.
But better to babysit than let the machines
get carried away with things.
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