Leibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. This blog is about the disruptive technologies that either have or will win over electronic engineers, some that won't, and why. Written by Steve Leibson, Tensilica's Technology Evangelist. See my history site at www.hp9825.com. You can email me by taking the first letter of my first name, appending that to my last name, then the magic email symbol, followed by the name of the company I work for, and then a dot followed by com.
Jul 17 2008 6:05PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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IEEE Spectrum magazine has just published a terrific article by Erico Guizzo titled Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse.
If you want a good, informative look into the multi-year development of a complex multi-robot system, this is your article. The story details the history of a company called Kiva, located in the Boston suburb of Woburn, which makes robotic warehousing systems. (Such systems aren’t all that new. I consulted for my dad in an accidental-death lawsuit against an early robotic warehousing company nearly 40 years ago—the robot didn't do it, by the way, it was human error—but thanks to 21st century electronics, Kiva’s squat little materials-handling robots don't appear to be much of a danger to anyone.)
Kiva’s warehousing systems are based on swarms of radio-controlled robots using some pretty fascinating cooperative/greedy-agent software technology and massive computer networking. I highly recommend the IEEE Spectrum article. It's a great read on many levels.