(Commonwealth Union)_An Amazon.com Inc. a recruiter received a message from Seattle earlier this year: Post help-wanted fliers in high schools, food banks, and homeless shelters—anywhere someone would be prepared to take an entry-level employment at one of the e-commerce giant’s warehouses.
The recruiter felt the command sounded desperate, but she was well aware of how difficult it had gotten to find people eager to work for Amazon. The difficulty was exemplified by a chat this person had with a prospective candidate at a job fair in Nevada. When he found out the beginning rate was $18.25 an hour, he declared he couldn’t afford to pay rent on that.
“He just walked away,” claimed the recruiter, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak openly about an internal topic. “It’s not the ideal job.”
Amazon, which rapidly replaces hourly workers, has long anticipated running out of warm people for its US fulfilment centers—an existential concern for a company that built its reputation on speedy, dependable delivery. While the warehouses are partially automated, Amazon still needs hundreds of thousands of people to operate alongside the machines.
Of course, additional robots are one solution to the labour shortage, but for years, technologists failed to match a human’s manual dexterity. Amazon appears to have solved the problem with a highly automated system that includes a yellow robotic arm capable of picking up millions of different sorts of things without crushing or dropping them.
Sparrow is the name of the new bot.
Amazon has not specified how Sparrow and its computer relatives will transform its business. However, patent filings, corporate blog entries, and management statements provide a roadmap of the company’s goals (see diagram, below). Robots will stow and retrieve individual products, load boxed boxes into carts for distribution, and pilot those carts to waiting trucks—labor that is currently primarily performed by humans.
Why it is significant: Due to increased demand for expedited delivery, the e-commerce behemoth is searching for ways to reduce package processing time. Workers who complain of accidents and weariness have used speed pressure to organise unions at some Amazon facilities.
According to Recode, citing internal Amazon research, the business is concerned that it may run out of workers to hire in its U.S. warehouses by 2024. Amazon’s response? Increased automation. The company intends to delegate the most difficult and monotonous work to robots, and then retrain employees for higher-skilled jobs such as mechatronics or software engineering.
According to Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, instead of displacing employees, robots can make their life easier. “You can gain enormous productivity if you redefine your relationship with machines.” Currently, around 75% of Amazon orders are touched by some type of automation during their route from warehouse to doorstep. Human hands are still primarily responsible for picking specific items and packaging them for delivery.
The most recent: Amazon has announced a plethora of new robots to assist it in moving, selecting, and shipping products. “Proteus”, for example, resembles a giant Roomba. The self-driving bot can transport an 800-pound delivery cart across a warehouse by sliding under it. Before shipments are sent out for delivery, robot arms like “Robin” and “Cardinal” can sift and divert them to different warehouse sites. According to the firm, Amazon’s newest robot, Sparrow, represents a significant advancement in automation.
Sparrow can recognise, select, and handle millions of individual products using computer vision and artificial intelligence, unlike previous robots that can only sort a few dozen sizes and types of packages. It operates as follows: During a recent demonstration at an Amazon robotics facility near Boston, the business demonstrated Sparrow’s capabilities, which can produce up to 330,000 robots every year. Sparrow’s robot arm dived into a container full of random products and plucked out certain objects with a “hand” consisting of little suction cups, which I observed. It was capable of identifying and selecting merchandise buried beneath other items, altering its grasp to handle various objects before dumping them in the right sorting container.
According to Amazon, Sparrow can recognise approximately 65% of the company’s product inventory and can determine whether an item is damaged and discard it. It improves as it learns.
