And with the addition of robots, injury rates increased as workers were forced to move faster to keep up with higher quotas. Before the robots arrived, a picker might have had a goal to handle 100 items an hour Amazon tripled those expectations when the robots, not the workers, did the traveling. In Amazon’s pre-Kiva days, these workers would walk 10 to 20 miles a day, plucking merchandise from, or adding goods to, aisle after aisle of inventory shelves. For those workers in picker or stower roles, robots now transport shelves to them at a stationary workstation, where they stand for 10 hours a day with padding beneath their feet. The Kiva robots did make some Amazon warehouse jobs easier. “Instead, it was about people and technology working safely and harmoniously together to deliver for our customers. “From the early days of the Kiva acquisition, our vision was never tied to a binary decision of people or technology,” the company said in a recent blog post. During the same period, the company says it has hired more than a million workers and points to this fact to try to dispel the notion that warehouse advancements are leading to worker elimination. In the decade since, it has rolled out more than 500,000 roaming warehouse robots. Van Chau, the company spokesperson, declined to provide details on the deployment of either the Cardinal or Robin robots.Īmazon’s history in robotics dates back to when it bought a company called Kiva for $775 million.
And last year, the company unveiled another robot arm that it calls Robin, which handles a similar task with lighter packages.
In June, Amazon announced a prototype of a robotic system called Cardinal that lifts and sorts already-packaged orders and, the company claims, “reduces the risk of employee injuries by handling tasks that require lifting and turning of large or heavy packages or complicated packing in a confined space.” The company says it expects to introduce the system into an unspecified number of fulfillment centers in 2023. How long it will take for Amazon to create a single robot that can handle the vast majority of products is up for debate, but it’s a question of “when,” not “if.” And when the “when” becomes “now,” we’ll have an answer to one of the great unknowns of this era of automation: Will a new generation of warehouse robots that can grasp goods almost as well as human hands make work better or easier for the people doing these jobs? Or will the technological evolution eliminate the need for these workers and their jobs?Īn Amazon spokesperson said the company is betting on the latter, based on the way it has utilized other types of robots in its warehouses up to now. But the company is working on grasping solutions that would be able to handle any and every type of item that could fit inside an Amazon box, perhaps by combining a pincher attachment with a popular suction method, and having the system trained to know which “hand” should be used for which item. On a larger scale, the two-pound weight restriction would still allow the robot to grasp a selection of items making up about half of Amazon’s total product assortment. In testing, the robot was asked to handle hundreds of different items in this weight group and successfully grasped and moved around 95 percent of them, according to Amazon spokesman Xavier Van Chau. This robot prototype can only move items weighing less than two pounds. The video and the robotic system in it were created late last year in a controlled lab test by Amazon technologists. Preliminary tests also found that the robot damages certain products at a much lower rate than other manipulation robots Amazon has tested. The robot utilizes multiple cameras to help it “see” the assortment of items in front of it, as well as machine learning to help it decide the best way to pick up a given item, and motion-planning algorithms to help the robot navigate the crowded scene without bumping or damaging any of the goods. From a box of crayons to a container of what looks like garlic powder to a whisk broom, each item is grasped and moved with no human direction. At the rate it’s going in the video, Amazon says the robot could handle more than 1,000 items an hour, meaning it could pick and stow items at rates several times faster than a human worker could. But it can pick up a new item and deposit it on a metal chute every three seconds. The proof-of-concept machine uses an off-the-shelf metal pincher rather than some novel grasping device. The robotic arm in question does not look as futuristic as you might imagine. Are you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts or tips on this topic? Please email Jason Del Rey at or His phone number and Signal number are available upon request by email.