Warehouse robots are sharing data to master human jobs

Right now, in a warehouse not far from Berlin, a bright yellow robot is leaning over a conveyor, picking items out of crates with the assurance of a chicken pecking grain.

The robot itself doesn’t look that unusual, but what makes it special are its eyes and brain. With the help of a six-lens camera array and machine learning algorithms, it’s able to grab and pack items that would confound other bots. And thanks to a neural network it will one day share with its fellows in warehouses around the world, anything it learns, they’ll learn, too. Show this bot a product it’s never seen before and it’ll not only work out how to grasp it, but then feed that information back to its peers.

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