US engineering and robotics firm Boston Dynamics unveiled its latest creation on Thursday: A smooth-moving robot designed for use in warehouses and factories.
This is Handle. Handle was first introduced in 2017 but this version has undergone significant changes. What makes Handle happy in life is moving boxes weighing up to 33 pounds from one stack to another around 12 feet away. Looking a bit like one of those nodding bird toys, Handle scoots around on two wheels before homing in on a box and lifting it with its crane-like neck.
When we first met Handle the wheeled robot was hopping and jumping to show off its agility, but a new demo video from Boston Dynamics is much more practical.
In the video it whizzes around a large warehouse with impressive agility and uses an overhead sucker to lift and move its loads. Boston Dynamics have opted to replace the two arms of the original design with an overhead sucker.
Once it has selected a box, it deploys a series of suction pads to grasp and manipulate it before placing it neatly in the desired location using a force control system. According to the company, the boxes weigh about 11 pounds each, but the robots can handle up to 33 pounds.
Boston Dynamics said: 'Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletising after initialisation and localising against the pallets.
'The on-board vision system on Handle tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing.'
Whether or not they're truly suited to this work is hard to tell, even with computer vision and all the slick counterbalancing shown, operating in a real-world environment with potential obstacles could be more complicated. Still, just like the first video, the quick sure movement is a reminder that the robot apocalypse is rapidly approaching.
Boston Dynamics is well-known for pushing the boundaries of robotics tech, with several videos of its creations going viral on the web. A favourite is dog-like robot SpotMini, which can autonomously navigate various environments including cluttered offices and narrow staircases.