There is a new robot in town, and it's called "Dill." The name makes more sense when you hear the company's name: PickleRobot.
A recent paper released by MIT CSAIL researcher shows how a robot can lift objects by mirroring human motion, like looking at one's biceps. The robot can do assembly tasks by following nonverbal commands and monitoring arm muscles.
But a new Cambridge-based startup is working to make sure the robots of the future need no human assistance. PickleRobot, an MIT spinoff, is launching from stealth with $3.7 million in a seed round led by Hyperplane Ventures. San Francisco-based Version One, Data Collective, New York-based RRE Ventures, Third Kind Ventures and Box Group also participated in the round.
Founded in July 2018 by Andrew Meyer, who also founded the deep tech R&D shop LeafLabs, PickleRobot is working on the second leg of automation at warehouses -- to stack and organize the 'picked' objects. Or as Meyer puts it, "We are in the box stacking business."
Robotic automation is an application that has attracted a lot interest from a variety of industries, most notably in eCommerce. Another one of Hyperplane Ventures portfolio company, Soft Robotics, plays in this space, as well. In Boston, companies like Vecna Robotics, 6River Systems and Locus Robotics are examples of robotic startups working on warehouse automation by finetuning a robot's ability to "pick" and "grasp" items.
"Most of [automation] we see today is in picking," said Meyer "There are a lot of companies in this space. But the impetus to start PickleRobot was to ask 'what happens after picking and placing?"
Once other robots have placed the items in the boxes, PickleRobot's Dill swoops in to stack these boxes in palettes and help in getting the boxes one step closer to the door. To that end, the company's robots can sort, palettize, depalletize and stack the said boxes. Meyer noted that this still remains a job with high human intervention, where a single box gets touched by humans at least 10-15 times on its way to the consumer.
"Loading trucks is a back-breaking job, so we decided to teach our robots to play Tetris."
PickleRobot is thinking not only about sorting and stacking boxes but also organizing the stacked boxes. Meyer commented that with this company, he envisions the concept of robots-as-a-service picking up pace.
"If you’re a warehouse that buys robots, you spend a lot more on these integrated solutions," he said. "We're a software company that delivers a product through a robot."
Based out of the Industry Lab in Inman Square in Cambridge, the company currently employs a staff of five MIT engineers and is looking to increase the headcount by hiring engineers in machine learning, vision and robotics.
Correction: This article originally stated that the company's name was Pickle Robots, not PickleRobot. It has been updated to reflect the correct spelling.
