[grecy]

I worked in a factory that was the distribution centre for all the cold and frozen food in every Safeway in the sate. There were a few hundred of us who had to pickup a heavy box from a conveyor belt, turn around, take a step or two and put the heavy box down on a pallet. When the pallet was full someone would come and take it away. Repeat. For 8-10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Upstairs people were manually putting those boxes on the belts. It destroyed people's bodies, I'm happy I only worked there for a few months each year to put myself through University.

The factory was very high tech and cutting edge, though the humans at each end of the conveyor belts were unavoidable.

We messed up all the time - dropped boxes, did bad stacking and made pallets fall over, crashed pallet jacks and knocked over pallets etc. The failure rate was probably around 5%, I'd guess.

Starting pay was around $30/hr, double that on Sundays, and 2.5 on Public Holidays

A humanoid robot that actually works most of the time will change the world.

[Clewza313]

This doesn't seem like the kind of problem that would require a humanoid robot to solve though? It's just that even with current state of the art robotics, things like grabbing cardboard boxes (easily crumpled or dropped, mass distribution within may be uneven or unstable, may already be broken or leaking etc) and stacking them into a stable 3D pallet is actually quite hard, so much so that Boston Dynamics managing to do some parts of this in optimal conditions with uniform, lightweight boxes was hailed as a breakthrough:

https://youtu.be/uuO6oeO0-ts