A few robots have been installed in Amazon’s warehouses, which the online retailer claims will increase productivity and lower worker accidents.
Packages up to fifty pounds in weight can be lifted by two robotic arms called Robin and Cardinal. A third person, known as Sparrow, retrieves objects from bins and places them in other containers.
Carts can be moved throughout a warehouse by Proteus, an autonomous mobile robot that works on the floor. Digit, a humanoid bipedal robot, is being tested to assist in moving empty totes using its hands. Additionally, Sequoia is a containerized storage system that may show staff totes in a way that prevents them from crouching or extending to get product.
Robin is currently in use at dozens of warehouses, according to Amazon. The others have not yet been widely implemented or are in the testing phase. However, the business claims to be already experiencing advantages, such shorter order fulfillment times and staff members avoiding monotonous work. However, if the robots rendered their jobs obsolete, workers would have to be retrained for other duties, which is another disadvantage of automation.
Amazon had an event in October at a warehouse in Nashville, Tennessee, where some of the robots had been incorporated. Julie Mitchell, the director of Amazon’s robotic sorting technology, discussed the company’s future goals with the Associated Press. The dialogue has been condensed for clarity and brevity.
Q: When you re working on robotics, how long does it typically take to roll out new technology?
A: It has taken us a few years to complete this journey. Fortunately, we’ve been doing this for more than ten years. Therefore, we have a wealth of foundational technology upon which to develop. In November 2022, we began using these specific robots, Cardinal and Proteus, in this building. We entered and started experimenting with how packing and moving a production order may appear. Seventy percent of the things in this building are shipped using that robots system, and we are at scale less than two years later.
Q: So, two years?
A: We discuss build, test, and scale, which is currently our two-year cycle.
Q: It s challenging to build robots that can physically grab products. How does Amazon work through that?
A: It’s a unique challenge since, as you may surely assume, we have a lot of goods. We use data, and we test our first prototype in a real building, exposing it to all the functions we require. Next, we eliminate every reason why it doesn’t work. We provide it with a wide range of sample sizes in a brief amount of time. For example, a couple of years ago, we launched our Robin robotics arm a package manipulation robot and we re at 3 billion picks. So the ability to launch into our network, rapidly collect data, scale and iterate has enabled us to go fast.
Perceiving the scene, planning your motion, and finally executing are the three basic components of the challenge itself. These three components make up our system today. All of that will change with the help of artificial intelligence, which will be more outcome-driven—for example, asking it to fetch a bottle of water. We’re at the brink, which is why I’m personally thrilled to be here at the beginning of generative AI and use it to significantly boost our robotics’ performance.
Q: How do you think about the impact of automation on Amazon s workforce as you re developing the technology?
A: With the technology we ve deployed here, we re creating new roles for individuals that can acquire new skills to fulfill those roles. And these new skills are not something that is too difficult to achieve. You don t need an engineering degree, Ph.D. or any really technical skills to support our robotics systems. We designed the systems so they re easy to service and train on the job to be a reliability maintenance engineer.
We are working backwards from the idea that we want to employ more skilled labor. These opportunities are obviously higher paid than the entry level jobs in our buildings. And partnering with MIT has helped us understand what matters most to our team as we re deploying these technologies across our network.
Q: Are you experiencing any challenges as you introduce these robots in your warehouses?
A: Not in the adoption. We re integrating it. But these are complex systems and this is the real world, so things go wrong. For example, we had bad weather due to the storms in the Southeast. When I look at the robotics systems data, I can tell the weather is bad outside because that dramatically affects how the ship dock works.
When trucks don t arrive on time or when they can t leave, you see bottlenecks in the building in strange ways. Containers build up, we have to put them in different places, and then humans need to recover them. So communication between what our robotics system is doing and what we need employees in the building to do to recover is important. It s a collaboration of automation and humans to deal with real-world problems. It s not a matter of having robotics take over but making it one system of humans and robotics working together to accomplish the goal of shipping the product.
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