Amazon’s new robots set for warehouse monotonous tasks

The debate whether rapid developments in robotics and artificial intelligence will aggravate human unemployment or not has been around for some time. Global e-commerce giant Amazon has just added a new dimension to the discussion by introducing two more automation technologies at its warehouses.The new robotic solutions, Sequoia and Digit, will support workplace safety and help Amazon deliver to customers faster, the company has claimed. "From our latest robotic arms like Sparrow and Cardinal, to our first autonomous mobile robot, Proteus, we’re excited to see the impact our technology is having in Amazon’s operations. We now have over 750,000 robots working collaboratively with our employees, taking on highly repetitive tasks and freeing employees up to better deliver for our customers".Amazon has a global workforce of almost 1.5mn, one million of whom are in its warehouses. The company has been introducing more technologies to automate human jobs for over ten years now, but it insists the aim is not to replace human workers but take over monotonous tasks and improve safety.Sequoia, now operating at a fulfilment centre in Houston, Texas, US, is supposed to reimagine how inventory is stored and managed, increase accuracy for delivery estimates, while also improving employee safety."Sequoia allows us to identify and store inventory we receive at our fulfilment centres up to 75% faster than we can today. This means we can list items for sale on Amazon.com more quickly, benefiting both sellers and customers. When orders are placed, Sequoia also reduces the time it takes to process an order through a fulfilment centre by up to 25%, which improves our shipping predictability and increases the number of goods we can offer for Same-Day or Next-Day shipping."Building off a series of research and development efforts, Sequoia integrates multiple robot systems to containerise Amazon’s inventory into totes, bringing together mobile robots, gantry systems, robotic arms, and a new ergonomic employee workstation.With this system, employees will no longer have to regularly reach above their heads or squat down to pick customer orders, supporting the efforts to reduce the risk of injuries. Once customer orders picked from inventory are retrieved, the remaining inventory needs to be consolidated so that the totes are full, and site storage is efficiently managed. This is where Amazon’s newest robotic arm, Sparrow, comes in, taking on the highly repetitive task of consolidating inventory in totes so that full totes can be returned to storage.Company data shows that, in 2022, recordable incident rates and lost-time incident rates were 15% and 18% lower, respectively, at Amazon Robotics sites than non-robotics sites. Sequoia will help continue this positive trend.Amazon Robotics have also begun testing mobile robots that can move while also grasping and handling items. Broadening the partnership with Agility Robotics, Amazon will begin testing their bipedal robot, Digit, for use in its operations, collaboratively with employees. The initial use for this technology will be to help employees with tote recycling, a highly repetitive process of picking up and moving empty totes once inventory has been completely picked out of them.Tye Brady, the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, admitted that while the robots will make some warehouse jobs redundant, their deployment will create new ones.He also said that the prospect of a future Amazon warehouse that was fully automated without any human workers would never be a reality. "People are so central to the fulfilment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems," he added.