Amazon Pegasus Robots Sort Packages

Posted on 14/06/2019 by Conner Flynn

Amazon is showing off its latest robots in use at its sorting center in Denver, Colorado. Their orange Pegasus robots are 2 feet-high and 3 feet-wide, and are designed specifically to swiftly sort packages and get them on their way. These robots roll on wheels and each of them has a tiny conveyor belt on top.

Here’s a brief description of how these orange bots work: “It rolls up to a station where an associate on the other side of a barrier fence scans a package, places it on the robot, and off it goes – navigating a “robot highway” inside the Denver sortation center. On-board cameras sense any surprise obstacles as the unit follows its programmed journey to an eject station. The conveyor moves the package off the unit and down the chute where it’s then readied for delivery. The robot completes its entire journey in roughly two minutes.”

Amazon’s Denver location started using the robots in October 2018, and since then, they have traveled over 1.5 million miles combined. Other sorting centers in the U.S. will get Pegasus robots later this year. The zippy little robots seem pretty efficient at their jobs.

[via Mike Shouts]

Make Your Own Cardboard Coin Sorting Machine

Posted on 04/04/2017 by Conner Flynn

These days you can pay for things in all kinds of electronic ways, but if you still find yourself with a bunch of coins, here is a fun way to sort them.

The Q channel shows us how to make a coin sorting machine using just cardboard, a knife, a metal ruler, and some glue. That’s it. Just build this thing, slide your coins inside and get them all sorted. This DIY tutorial video will show you how. As long as your country’s coins have different sizes, this will work perfectly.

Then you can take your sorted coins and put them away so they collect dust again. Or you know, spend them.

[via Laughing Squid]

M&Ms and Skittles Flavor Sorting Machine: Split the Rainbow

Posted on 07/02/2017 by Conner Flynn

Are you the kind of candy diva who buys a bag of Skittles, only to eat certain colors? Maybe you work for one who makes you pluck them out for them. Either way, this machine will sort M&M’s and Skittles by color easily, because you don’t need to taste the rainbow.

19-year-old Willem Pennings built this Arduino-powered machine that makes quick work of the task. It uses a color sensor, stepper motor, and 3D-printed parts to direct the flow of candy into six bowls. Now you can just eat what you want, without having to wade through all of them by hand. Seems weird to me, but I don’t judge.

[reddit via Laughing Squid]

Skittles Sorting Machine

Posted on 23/01/2013 by Craziest Gadgets Jeff

skittles sorting machine Skittles Sorting Machine
Taste the rainbow…one color at a time. Does the world need a Skittles sorting machine? Yes we do. We do, for no other reason than to comply with aging rock stars’ bizarre backstage requests. Mechatronic built this important invention that sorts Skittles or M&M’s by color using a BASIC Stamp 2 written in PBASIC code. Watch this video to see it in action, sorting the colorful candies into separate bowls by color:

It can sort at a rate of 37 Skittles per minute (37 SPM). A color sensor detects red, green, and blue hues, then sends that value to the controller to determine which bin the servo motor should move the candy to. Things got tricky when you factor in the white “S” on top of each one. But they worked around it (thank goodness). Now if only they could make one that sorts out all the M&M’s from trail mix, or all the macadamia nuts from a nut mix (why do they always skimp on the macadamias?) (via hacked gadgets)

Skittles Sorting Machine

Geek Accomplishment: 65,000 LEGO Bricks Sorted in 71 Hours

Posted on 22/07/2012 by Conner Flynn

71 hours. That’s almost 3 days. That’s how long it takes to sort 65,000 LEGO bricks of varying colors. We know this because one dynamic duo has just accomplished the task.
lego sorting

Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh (of the Swedish band Rymdreglage) are creating the sequel to their famous stop motion LEGO music video 8-Bit Trip. In preparation for the task, they poured out 100 boxes of LEGO pieces that each contained 650 blocks. They then had two cameras snap a photo every 20 seconds over 71 hours of sorting by color.

The time-lapse video was created using the 12,775 photos that each memory card ended up with when they were done. It’s a pretty impressive feat. I would get way too bored trying to sort out that many LEGO pieces. The 65,000 sorted blocks will be used to make a followup to their first video, to be titled “8-Bit Trip 2″. For now, sit back and enjoy the original:

[via Petapixel]

Microsoft Research team shatters data sorting record, wrenches trophy from Yahoo

Posted on 22/05/2012 by Alexis Santos

Bruise inducing high-fives, anyone? They're handing them out in Redmond, according to one mildly injured researcher, after breaking a data sorting record Yahoo set in 2009. The ruckus surrounds a benchmark called MinuteSort, which measures how much data can be sorted in 60 seconds. Microsoft's Distributed Systems group utilized a new file system architecture, dubbed Flat Datacenter Storage, over a full bisection bandwidth network to burn through the competition.

Not only did the nine-person crew best the old record nearly by a factor of three, it gave itself a handicap -- sorting 1,401 GB of data at 2 GB/s over a remote file system, forcing the system to crunch data at a slower speed than the technique is capable of. It's not all about bragging rights, however, Bing has its eye on the newfangled file system in hopes of boosting its RPM. Microsoft suspects the tech could also pick up the pace of machine learning and churn through large data sets in a jiffy. You can catch Microsoft Research's detailed explanation in all its glory at the source.

Update: Commenter Mark Streich points out that while 2 GB/s may sound fast, it's certainly not speedy enough to sort 1,401 gigabytes in a single minute. To achieve that performance, simultaneous input and output speeds could hit 2GB/s on each computer used.

Microsoft Research team shatters data sorting record, wrenches trophy from Yahoo originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 05:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

The Next Web | source

Microsoft Research | Email this | Comments

GIZMODO.cz

Syndicated rss news

Tag Archives: sorting