Skip to main content

This scanner could one day make moving a whole lot easier

You could have a dozen friends helping you move into a new place, but at the end of the day, unpacking is still a nightmare. A group of students at Carnegie Mellon know what it’s like, and they’ve decided to do something about it.

In partnership with Ford, a group of students dreamed up the ultimate tool to make moving easier, according to Fast Company. It’s called Argo, and it looks more like a supermarket scanner than anything else. The device would log everything you pack, and it’ll catalog it all for the utmost organization. Once the time comes to unpack, you’ll know exactly where everything is.

Recommended Videos

It all begins as soon as you mount Argo on the corner of a cardboard box. Once it’s in place, it uses a camera to scan items as you put them into the box, placing them in a digital inventory as you go. After the box is full, the scanner will begin to dispense packing tape, which has a special tag defining the contents inside.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The labels light up when they are selected, and their information can be accessed via tablet using an Argo app. With a tablet, a moving specialist will have all of your inventory and moving information at his or her fingertips. The Argo tags will let your movers know where your boxes should be placed in your new abode.

Beyond the scanner, the students came up with some new tech. Argo will also come with an interactive card (which looks like a see-through credit card). This little item will house all of your inventory data, allowing you to communicate with movers and monitor the entire moving process remotely. When you’re done, you can use the card to pay your movers and start enjoying your new home.

Argo is still just a concept right now, but we can only hope it will be on the market before we have to start packing up boxes for our next move.

Krystle Vermes
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Krystle Vermes is a professional writer, blogger and podcaster with a background in both online and print journalism. Her…
Doctors could one day diagnose Alzheimer’s with a simple eye exam
comcast xfinity x1 eye control for those with physical disabilities

 

It’s hard to overstate how devastating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s can be. But while there is no cure for Alzheimer's yet, early diagnosis that results in earlier treatment can help to delay its progression. Today, a doctor diagnosing Alzheimer’s would likely do so through a combination of memory tests, blood tests (to rule out other reasons for memory being affected), and a CT scan. However, in the future it could conceivably be as simple as carrying out a relatively basic eye test. This may speed up diagnosis since it could show positive results before the onset of symptoms.

Read more
This tiny robot tank could one day help doctors explore your intestine
Endoculous

 

With a bulky, armored appearance, heavy duty treads for gripping, and a claw arm on the front, the Endoculus robot vehicle looks like it belongs on the battlefield. In fact, it’s just 3 cm wide, 2.3 cm tall, and designed for an entirely different kind of inhospitable environment: Your intestine.

Read more
Stanford’s shape-shifting ‘balloon animal’ robot could one day explore space
Stanford soft robotics 1

Stanford engineers develop crawling and transforming soft robot

The cool thing about balloon animals is that, using the same basic inflatable building blocks, a skilled person can create just about anything you could ask for. That same methodology is what’s at the heart of a recent Stanford University and University of California, Santa Barbara, soft robotics project. Described by its creators as a “large-scale isoperimetric soft robot,” it’s a human-scale robot created from a series of identical robot roller modules that are mounted onto inflatable fabric tubes. Just like the balloon animals you remember, this leads to some impressive shape-shifting inventiveness.

Read more