Sparro, a mechanical arm used by Amazon that manipulates and categorizes objects,
The birthplace of the robots and machines that Amazon makes and employs to simplify its operations and make life easier for its employees is Westborough, a Massachusetts village close to the city of Boston.
During the “Delivering the Future” event, where he brought a group of journalists closer to the innovations he is working on for both internal usage and for the delivery of his shipments to customers, the firm demonstrated how these creations function.
First off, Joseph Quinlivan, vice president of Amazon Robotics and Information Technologies, emphasized that the firm has established a reputation for its speed and diversity of products, and that in 2022 it will mark ten years of “substantial investment in sophisticated technology.
Tye Brady, the chief of technology at Amazon Robotics, further stated in later interviews with Europa Press that this increase has been witnessed, for instance, in the establishment of over 700 new job categories and the creation of more than a million jobs in that time.
According to the figures from the previous year, during this period its sales volume has also increased to the point where its personnel worldwide gathered, stored, or packed over 5 billion shipments (or about 13 million every day).
Due to the fact that two of its logistics facilities are based in the United States, the global leader in electronic commerce has chosen to implement cutting-edge technology to speed up the preparation and distribution of items.
Brady recalled that there are really two centers that Amazon has erected in this region in recent years, so Newborough isn’t the only Massachusetts town with a facility of this kind.
On the other hand, he emphasized that “thousands of people labor in the creation of robotics teams,” but only a combined 400 personnel are spread across the two facilities.
The first of them, which has four lines of business and is headquartered in North Reading, has been operational since 2012 but was only responsible for the design of these robots up until last year.
With the opening of BOS27, its factory in Newborough combined the task of creating new machines with the production of the various models that already coexist in its fleet, for which it has six lines in total. This way, between both centers, it is capable of registering 330,000 newly created robots per year, which indicates that a robot is produced per hour.
Hercules, Proteus, Robin, Pegasus, and starting today, Sparrow, a mechanical arm that employs a camera and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to cure the company’s products, are just a few of the robots that are produced in both facilities.
Sparrow recognizes, handles, and classifies products of various categories, as opposed to other robots in the company’s fleet that can just transfer objects from one location to another (from packages with hair ties to books or packaged cables).
To classify them, it not only identifies the product in question, but also reads their corresponding barcodes, saving employees from having to spend time and energy on mechanized processes. This robot uses a vacuuming technique to place products that are in good condition in different cubicles so that employees can quickly collect the already organized merchandise.
Sparrow, on the other hand, has a system that detects objects and knows how to handle them appropriately. For instance, when he takes up a book, he does so for the spine or the cover rather than the pages, preventing page wrinkling.
Additionally, it has the ability to detect broken or damaged objects, such as a dented box or a compost bag with a flaw that allows the contents to leak, and discards them as it goes along.
THE AUTONOMOUS ROBOT CREATED FOR HEAVY LOADS IS NAMED PROTEUS.
Amazon has demonstrated this Thursday what it calls its “big technical bet,” but during the tour it provided at BOS27, it once again demonstrated how other robots it uses in these facilities function.
Proteus, its first fully autonomous warehouse robot, which it unveiled last summer and uses a scanning approach owing to a sophisticated system of sensors, has been one of those that has raised the most anticipation.
Unlike Hercules, Robin, or Sparrow, Proteus can function in the presence of workers, without impeding your work. This device has been created to be able to travel around a warehouse freely without the need to be inside a cage or behind bars.
It is made to move carts with big loads up to 800 pounds (360 kilograms), avoiding the need for employees to move them. This speeds up the supply chain process and acts as a healthy substitute for manual labor.
As described by Amazon Robotics program manager Mikell Taylor, this “modular robot” moves freely throughout the workspace and identifies when a worker crosses or obstructs its path so that it can stop without upsetting or hurting him.
We conceive of them as if they were animals on a farm, so that they complement the activities of the personnel, Taylor has stressed, adding that Amazon “does not intend to replace” staff with the development of this sort of robots.
In a similar vein, Erica McClosky, the worldwide director of Amazon Robotics Manufacturing, has confirmed that the company prefers to continue working in this area of robotics, which is more utilitarian, rather than choosing humanoid robots, as other companies, such as Xiaomi or Tesla, have already done.
Mobility and product handling are our two main areas of attention. Our goal is to produce practical robotics that are in line with corporate policies, benefit employees, and also provide value for customers, not to achieve a milestone with a technology that combines the most recent advancements in this field.
For the same reasons, McClosky has emphasized that the introduction of robotics in its factories should not be interpreted as the replacement of humans by machines (and, as a result, fewer job offers), but rather as evidence that “Amazon continues to show interest in the speed in the distribution of products, the safety of customers and workers, and the offer of jobs at the local level” in order to promote the circular economy in the cities where these centers are deployed.