This Robot Will Put Box-Makers Out of a Job
The once venerable American box-industry could be due for a major shakeup.
Back in my grandfather’s day, a person could make a living off the sweat of their own brow, toiling to construct boxes. It takes skill and ingenuity to correctly tape a cardboard box together, turning it from a flat useless piece of composite paper product into a handy useful box, but as we well know, there is no frontier too distant for the inevitable robot expansion. We’ve tried to stop them, but the robots will have their due. Active8 Robotic’s latest application of the versatile Sawyer robot is as a box maker, a constructor of cardboard, a wizard with paper and tape.
Sawyer uses a few aids to construct the cardboard, as its visual sensors make sure the arm properly lines up boxes on the slide and tape-tray. In the future, maybe professional movers will have a Sawyer bot in the back of their truck, churning out constructed boxes from flattened ones, ready to pack things in. As silly as it looks, it would actually be pretty convenient to have around if you need to erect dozens of cardboard boxes quickly, but the future implication of Sawyer’s new task is just to show off the platform’s versatility.
Regardless, it’s fun to watch its stupid little cute iPad face change expression as it’s boxing things up:
