Boston Dynamics Stretch robot is built for boxes, not backflips
In spring 2021, Boston Dynamics unveiled Stretch, designed for far less glamorous purposes than the company's other creations. While Spot and Atlas capture people's attention around the world with dancing and backflips, Stretch is built to move boxes in warehouses.
This debut marks the company's official entry into the warehouse automation market, a fast-growing market fueled by rising demand from e-commerce.
Boston Dynamics will no doubt keep delighting people with fun viral videos of its advanced robots dancing to 80s music. However, when it comes to actually selling robotics, the real targets remain dull, dirty and dangerous jobs that people don't want to do.
The Spot robot has already succeeded as an inspection robot. The four-legged helper has been used at oil rigs, nuclear power plants and other places where most people would prefer not to be or would minimize their time there. That's why the company is wisely sending a second commercially available robot after dull warehouse work.
Stretch has a much more practical form factor than Spot or Atlas, although it still resembles the company's other robots. The device has a square wheeled base the size of a box, a "perception mast" with cameras and sensors, a multi-jointed robotic arm with seven degrees of motion, and a suction-cup "hand" that lifts boxes weighing up to 23 kg.
Although Stretch may be more practical than previous models, it remains groundbreaking for a commercial product. Unlike the stationary robots typically found in warehouses, it can move around relatively freely. As a result, it can be integrated into many warehouses to load, move or unload boxes.
Boston Dynamics described the robot: "Stretch is a versatile mobile box-handling robot designed to deploy easily in existing warehouses. Unload trucks and load boxes faster by putting the robot to work, eliminating the need for new fixed infrastructure."
Stretch's technology is built on the company's decades of robotics advances to create a flexible, easily integrated solution that can work in any warehouse, increasing product throughput, improving employee safety during physically demanding tasks, and reducing costly ongoing automation expenses.
Most warehouses around the world are not designed for automation, giving Boston Dynamics a large potential market for Stretch. Initially, the company developed a prototype called Handle for this purpose, but it was not fast enough. By comparison, the new model can safely grip and move boxes at higher speeds thanks to a recently developed lightweight arm that can rotate on its own.
Handle was a commercial robot the company introduced in a viral video more than four years ago. The wheeled robot was a versatile machine with an impressive ability to keep its balance while sliding and overcoming various obstacles. It could lift boxes weighing up to 45 kg and perform several different tasks, but too slowly. Now the Stretch robot clearly demonstrates how radically the company rethought the bot to make it commercially viable.
Boston Dynamics claims the robot uses "advanced control and manipulation capabilities" to handle a wide variety of boxes and film-wrapped pallets. It also features computer vision technology that allows it to identify boxes without extensive preparation.
It can move up to 800 boxes per hour, equivalent to a human worker, while operating without recharging for eight hours. The company says employees will need only a few hours of training to start using the robot. It remains to be seen whether this figure holds up in real-world conditions, especially in warehouses with a wide range of products.
“Warehouses are struggling to keep up with rapidly growing demand as the world increasingly relies on timely delivery of goods. Mobile robots make it easy to move materials and improve working conditions for employees. Stretch combines Boston Dynamics' advances in mobility, perception and manipulation to tackle the most complex and potentially dangerous tasks, and we are excited to see how it works”
The example of self-driving cars shows us that getting robots to work in the real world has proven far harder than many incredibly smart people thought. We will learn the full truth about this Boston Dynamics robot soon enough, since the company plans to begin sales in 2022.
