How Amazon is plumbing warehouse work with robots amid worker safety concerns Premium

Between the time a customer clicks ‘buy’ in an Amazon app and gets the product delivered, a series of tasks are performed at warehouses by Amazon robots.

Between the time a customer clicks ‘buy’ in an Amazon app and gets the product delivered are a series of tasks that Amazon performs at its warehouse. And a growing number of these tasks are being automated and handled by a system of robots at some of its facilities in the U.S. and few other countries.

At Amazon’s facility in Sumner, Washington, robotic arms pick products from the conveyor belt and send them to another location where they get assigned to a specific spot in totes, a word for open top containers in Amazon parlance. These totes are then stowed away in tall pods waiting to be released when a customer places an order. Separately, another state-of-the-art robotic arm recognises and handles products using artificial intelligence (AI).

Mobile autonomous vehicles, that may potentially replace forklifts in warehouses, move specific racks based on request. Using computer vision, these floor-based robotic vehicles identify the rack where a particular product is placed. Once they identify the rack, they slide under the shelf, slightly lift it up and move to the next point where a warehouse worker will handle the packaging process.

Some of the packaging is also handled by robotic systems. For instance, if the product is under a specified weight, an automated conveyor belt system takes care of packaging and labelling before the item is taken out of the facility.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

Amazon claims to be the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial robots, and the retail giant has already deployed over 7.5 lakh robots across its facilities globally.

The retail juggernaut is planning to induct Agility Robotics’s state-of-the-art bipedal robot into its army of robots. At the company’s ‘Delivering The Future’ summit, Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, announced testing of the humanoid robots that can move, grasp and handle totes.