Automaton

Check this out -- Kiva Systems' robots in action in a Staples warehouse. I've seen one of these up close before (carrying a person, actually)... it's pretty neat. The bearings used to keep the payload in the same orientation must be pretty crazy. When I saw one in action, it used little bar-code type labels to follow on the floor, but there's some net intelligence directing them because these guys are all moving in an overall organized fashion -- this article from the video producer, Fast Company, suggests that "blinking blue lights" help coordinate them somehow. At some point in the future we'll talk with the creators and see what we can find out!

Video by Fast Company

Having attended a wonderful wine tasting last night at a former professor's house, I've been feeling particularly oenophilic. During the tasting the professor told us about a lot of the technology vineyard owners have started using to track their crops. Since vines produce different fruit depending on shade, temperature, amount of water, type of soil, and so on, a good vineyard owner needs to know all about the different conditions all over his or her vineyard -- and small, cheap sensor technology only makes that easier. This of course led me to the natural conclusion: my wine could only be better if a robot is involved!

So what can robots do for a wine geek like me? I could purchase my very own "Robo-sommelier" to see if I'm actually getting what I'm buying -- using infrared light, it can tell what the type of the wine is without even opening it -- or it could learn my tastes and be able to recommend a wine to pair with my dinner.

Before the wine gets to my table, a vineyard owner might use an automated tractor to care for the vines. It can navigate using the wires that the vines grow on and can tow a sprayer or other equipment, preventing a human from having to do the long, dull task of driving the tractor through a huge vineyard. A 5-DOF robotic hand combined with a vision system might be doing some of the harvesting or care for the bunches of grapes on the vine. A friend at the wine tasting with me mentioned having seen one vineyard in which a robotic system rotated and tipped bottles slightly each day as they aged.

The agriculture industry is really embracing robotics and automation (Rocona is one example; John Deere and others are following suit), but it will be interesting to see if the wine industry actually adopts the technologies being created for them. Vineyard owners pride themselves on understanding their crops and how climate conditions will affect their output; sommeliers and wine aficionados are proud of their tasting abilities and standards. Will these people really want to hand over their art to machines?

The folks at Kiva Systems pointed us to this little video they put together for the holiday season. Watch the 24 Kiva warehouse-automation bots dance to the tune of "March" from Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker."

The robotic ballet, choreographed by Kiva's Ryan Gariepy and Rob Stevens, took place at the company's headquarters in Woburn, Mass. "We didn't really choreograph it," Stevens told us, "it was more free-form dance!"

Photo: Joel Eden Photography/Kiva Systems

There's been a lot of press about Kiva Systems, the Boston-area startup that developed mobile robots to automate pick-and-pack warehouse operations. No article, however, has really explained the technology that lets the Kiva robots do what they do -- swarm a warehouse by the hundreds and in a highly coordinated bot ballet deliver inventory to workers, racks of products arriving one after another in seconds, flawlessly.

In other words, there have been few or no details about the robots' control system, their mechanical design, and the overall resource-allocation algorithms. Until now. Spectrum has filled this gap with an in-depth article ("Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse") by yours truly in the July issue.

The two things that most impressed me about Kiva's technology were the distributed control and the robots' mechanical design.