Pickle Robot Aims to Relieve Warehouse Workers with AI-Powered Automation
There are some jobs human bodies just weren’t meant to do. Unloading trucks and shipping containers is a repetitive,grueling task – and a big reason warehouse injury rates are more than twice the national average.
The Pickle Robot Company wants its machines to do the heavy lifting. The company’s one-armed robots autonomously unload trailers, picking up boxes weighing up to 50 pounds and placing them onto onboard conveyor belts for warehouses of all types.
The company name,an homage to The Apple Computer Company,hints at the ambitions of founders AJ Meyer ’09,Ariana Eisenstein ’15,SM ’16,and Dan Paluska ’97,SM ’00. The founders want to make the company the technology leader for supply chain automation.
The company’s unloading robots combine generative AI and machine-learning algorithms with sensors, cameras, and machine-vision software to navigate new environments on day one and improve performance over time. Much of the company’s hardware is adapted from industrial partners. You may recognize the arm, as a notable example, from car manufacturing lines – though you may not have seen it in luminous pickle-green.
The company is already working with customers like UPS, Ryobi Tools, and Yusen Logistics to take a load off warehouse workers, freeing them to solve other supply chain bottlenecks in the process.
“Humans are really good edge-case problem solvers, and robots are not,” Paluska says. “How can the robot, which is really good at the brute force, repetitive tasks, interact with humans to solve more problems? Human bodies and minds are so adaptable, the way we sense and respond to the environment is so adaptable, and robots aren’t going to replace that anytime soon. But there’s so much drudgery we can get rid of.”
Finding problems for robots
Meyer and Eisenstein majored in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, but they didn’t work together until after graduation, when Meyer started the technology consultancy Leaf labs, which specializes in building embedded computer systems for things like robots, cars, and satellites.
“A bunch of friends from MIT ran that shop,” Meyer recalls, noting it’s still running today. “Ari worked there, Dan consulted there, and we worked on some big projects. We were the primary software and digital design team behind Project Ara, a smartphone for Google, and we worked on a bunch of captivating government projects. It was really a lifestyle company for MIT kids. But 10 years go by, and we thought, ‘We didn’t get into this to do consulting. We got into this to do robots.'”
When Meyer graduated in 2009,problems like robot dexterity seemed insurmountable. By 2018, the rise of algorithmic approaches like neural networks had brought huge advances to robotic manipulation and navigation.
To figure out what problem to solve with robots, the founders talked to people in industries as diverse as agriculture, food prep, and hospitality. At some point, they started visiting logistics warehouses, bringing a stopwatch to see how long it took workers to complete different tasks.
“In 2018, we went to a UPS warehouse and watched 15 guys unloading trucks during a winter night shift,” Meyer recalls. “We spoke to everyone