Boston Dynamics: Handle 2.0 will handle the packaging of packages

Boston Dynamics is finally back with a new project, or better to say, a redesign of a non-perfect robot made in 2017. We are talking about Handle, not the usual robot of the company that does spectacular things and designed for rescue or help of people, but a useful machine for the autonomous management of the loading and unloading of entire pallets.

It is a robot designed primarily for a ” warehouse ” job, which would be perfect for the preparation of package packaging managed by department stores like Amazon. The company has redesigned the old machine, changing what it didn’t convince to increase the stability of the robot and to increase the weight of the packages that Handle can handle.

Handle was largely designed with an experiment that applies the know-how of Boston Dynamics robots, typically used for bipedal or quadruped machines, to wheeled machines. Initially, the robot was designed with two twin arms that worked simultaneously, but in this new version, only an extendable arm with suction cups capable of gripping objects up to 30 pounds was used.

The boxes that are moved in the video have a weight of 5 kg, a sign that the robot is still in the training phase to allow the machine learning to understand how to better manage the various boxes.

Handle manages to stack boxes up to 1.2 meters deep (the precise figure is 4 feet) and about 1.7 meters in height (also in this case the data has been reported as standing, ie 5.5). Integrated vision systems help manage boxes located on pallets and then grab them and reposition them elsewhere.

Like many of the Boston Dynamics projects, Handle is still only a prototype for now and the company has not yet announced any plans to turn it into a commercial product; despite this, we believe that it will not take much longer to find it in some companies, and it will be curious to observe how they will be integrated in the department store workflow.