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Comment by mattfredfry | Hacker News Reader

Can all boxes be safely picked up by suctioning the top? Seems like most packaging is designed to be supported from the bottom.

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Yeah, it seems like such a terrible constraint. Maybe okay for loading in a factory where:

* in a factory the boxes can be changed to suit the robot (limited by how automated the box loading and top sealing is). If the boxes need changing then it makes selling the robot far more difficult.

* in a factory the contents are of a predictable weight, and the boxes are predictable sizes

* in a factory the loads are not mixed

* the factory doesn’t palletise their boxes

Is there a marketplace where you can bet against the success of an individual product? Although given than most products fail, then either (a) the odds are poor e.g. win 10% more than your stake, or (b) you pay out huge amounts if the product succeeds (similar to how you can lose a lot of money shorting a stock).

They talk about a fence around the robot, which is only viable if the robot needs help very rarely. If the robot needs help a lot (boxes over 23kg, boxes of unsupported sizes like TVs) safety issues would quickly arise, and liability kills the product.

This seems more suited for a distribution center or cross-dock/3PL use case (where you’d be dealing with non-palletized mixed-box shipments in high-enough volume for it to matter.

I don't think this is as much of a constraint as you'd expect. Imagine you manage to pull 1 psi over a 10x10" patch of box. That's 100lb of lifting force. If you're worried about whether the cardboard can handle it spread the area and lower the pressure more. I don't think 1lb per square inch of cardboard would be an issue and it looks like they have more surface area for suction than that.

Without bottom support, contents might fall through an inappropriately supportive box.

The answer is "no, not all boxes, but yes some boxes".

Last time I moved I spent a fortune on double corrugated boxes. I bought a cardboard stapler and taped it.

Heavy boxes still needed support from the bottom.

Yes, I wondered that from the first demonstration months ago. I've got no doubt that sufficient suction can be generated for the needed lifting forces, but indeed, will the packaging tolerate it?

While my shop doesn't do a huge amount of shipping and is not a big shipper, and most boxes can tolerate it, I can definitely think of both outgoing and incoming boxes I wouldn't want to see picked up by the top... .

i've only got limited experience working in a warehouse, but i think that yes, they can safely assume that any box packed loose in a shipping container or truck doesn't need to be supported from the bottom.

suction on the side or top isn't really any different from a human packer grabbing it with a hand on each side. heavier things that really need bottom support would usually be shipped on pallets.

> isn't really any different from a human packer grabbing it with a hand on each side. heavier things that really need bottom support would usually be shipped on pallets.

That certainly explains the sad state of a couple of heavy packages I've received recently after clearly making similar assumptions and being mishandled in shipping.

I’d imagine if you’d just spent $$$$ on fancy robots ups probably fork out for nicer boxes if required to make the robots useful. ;)

I spent a few summers working at a distribution center for all the cold and frozen food for every Safeway in the state. Upstairs people put boxes onto conveyor belts, the system sorted them into lanes and downstairs people put the boxes onto "per store" pallets.

At least every 30 minutes someone would pickup a box of yogourt/orange juice/whatever and the bottom would fall out and they would wear the contents.

Boxes are NOT usually designed to be pickup up from above.

idk what kind of sci-fi cardboard they're working with, but here they're picking up boxes from a single side:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUuWWnfRsk

Not all, but enough to make this a viable product. There are a lot of high volume, low-sku warehouses where each product is light enough for Stretch's arm.

As with any robotics project, there are a lot of ways that this might fail, but my money is not on boxes being too heavy or flimsy.

They could be stored in small containers.

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