Roboticising the Living Room

 Don't think I want this,  just notable. Rent it for some rearrangement?

Warehouse Robots to Automate Your Living Room Kachaka’s warehouse-inspired mobile base can move your furniture around    By Evan Ackerman 

A couple decades ago Kiva Systems had the brilliant and certainly very valuable realization that it was possible to make an entire environment (like a fulfillment warehouse) robotic without filling that entire environment with robots. Rather than making every shelf in a warehouse into a robot, you could instead leave every shelf as a shelf, and simply make a robot that could interface with shelves on-demand, giving them mobility when required.

So what if you take that philosophy out of the warehouse and into your living room? Well, it’s probably not going to massively boost your productivity or increase your own personal fulfillment all that much, but it’s an interesting idea that might make some things a little more convenient from time to time.  ... ' 

Forward on Automated Warehouses

Automated warehouses are not new, but their use has expanded and improved as part of broader fulfillment process.

Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon

Locus Robotics is raising serious cash in its bid to automate warehouses, bringing industry investment to $70 million this year.     By Kim Bhasin  and Patrick Clark  in Bloomberg

A few years ago, Amazon.com Inc. triggered a robot arms race when it purchased a company called Kiva Systems, maker of automated warehouse robots. Now its would-be rivals are landing bigger and bigger cash injections to try to compete with the e-commerce giant.

Locus Robotics, a spinoff of a warehouse company that decided to build its own robots after the Amazon deal in 2012, raised another $25 million in venture capital, bringing its total funding to more than $33 million, the company announced last week. 

The new cash for Locus followed a $15 million injection in July for 6 River Systems Inc., a robotics company founded by ex-Kiva executives. In March, China warehouse robotics startup Geek+, which boasts Alibaba as a client, raised $22 million. Competitor RightHand added $8 million in venture funding this year as well.  .... "

Towards Lights-Out Fulfillment

'Lights-Out' used to be a favorite term when we worked in AI applications for the enterprise. Dramatically implying no humans, or lights needed to be involved.    Near total automation is still not here, but is approaching.  Consider the implications.  I note that Amazon now has 341K employees.  
Also it seems that most significant technological change mentioned here has Amazon involvement.   Now well over the tipping point for Influencing broad changes. Towards lights-out.  Keep watching their activity in this space.

Bezos move spurs $20B of growth in logistics robotics
Lights-out fulfillment will be the new norm within a decade   By Greg Nichols for Robotics.  In ZdNet.

This year is turning out to be a tipping point for how companies manage e-commerce fulfillment.

Worldwide sales of warehousing and logistics robots hit a respectable $1.9 billion in 2016. By 2021, according to a forecast by research firm Tractica, the market will hit a whopping $22.4 billion.

To better conceptualize the market explosion underway, consider that 40,000 units of warehousing and logistics robots were sold last year. A projected 620,000 units will be sold in 2021.

Why the change? In short: Amazon. If the last couple Prime Days proved anything, it's that a) Jeff Bezos is allowed to declare national holidays, and b) the investment Amazon made in warehouse logistics when it bought Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012 presaged a complete transformation in global commerce.  ... " 

Cooperative Robotics for Amazon

Like humans being augmented by AI, here in the physical world.

How Locus Robotics Plans to Build a Successor to Amazon's Kiva Robots
By Evan Ackerman

Locus’ robot is designed to work collaboratively with humans to fill orders in a warehouse. It’s a mobile base that can navigate autonomously using lidar to track its location in a pre-mapped area, with cameras and 2D barcodes for verification. Each robot knows the location of every item in the warehouse, and when an item needs to be picked for an order, the robot will navigate to that item and wait.

Humans workers are assigned to patrol warehouse zones, and when they see a robot waiting, the worker reads the item that it needs off the screen, picks it, and moves on. The robot then drives to the location of the next item that it needs, or heads for a shipping station. It’s a very efficient system, since humans aren’t carrying anything or having to roam all over a warehouse to fulfill one order: instead, they’re doing what they’re best at, which is identifying and picking objects off of shelves. ... " 

Amazon Robot Arms Race

Good overview ....   What characteristics of robotic capability are most involved?

How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race
In 2012 Jeff Bezos scooped up warehouse automation firm Kiva. Everyone else is still trying to catch up.    by Kim Bhasin  ....