As Amazon expands use of warehouse robots, what will it mean for workers?

Amazon has introduced a handful of robots into its warehouses that the e-commerce giant says will improve and reduce efficiency injuries to workers.

Two robotic arms named Robin and Cardinal can lift packages weighing up to 50 pounds. A third party, named Sparrow, takes items out of bins and puts them in other containers.

Proteus, an autonomous mobile robot that operates on the floor, can move carts around a warehouse. The bipedal humanoid robot Digit is being tested to help move empty bins with its hands. And there’s also Sequoia, a containerized storage system that allows bins to be presented to employees in a way that allows them to stretch or crouch to grab inventory.

According to Amazon, Robin is currently used in dozens of warehouses. The others are in a testing phase or have not yet been widely rolled out. But the company says it is already seeing benefits, such as reducing the time it takes to fulfill orders and helping employees avoid repetitive tasks. However, automation also has disadvantages for workerswho would have to be retrained for new positions if the robots made their role redundant.

In October, Amazon held an event at a warehouse in Nashville, Tennessee, where the company had integrated some robots. The Associated Press spoke with Julie Mitchell, director of Amazon’s robotic sorting technologies, about where the company hopes to go. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A: This journey we’ve been on has taken a few years. Fortunately, we have been working on this for more than ten years. So we have a lot of core technology that we can build on top of. We started working in this building in November 2022 with these specific robots – Cardinal and Proteus. We came in and started playing with what it would look like to pack and move a production order. Less than two years later, we are at scale, shipping 70% of the items in this building through that robotics system.

A: We talk about “build, test and scale” and that’s about a two-year cycle for us right now.

A: As you can probably imagine, we have so many items, so it’s an exceptional challenge. We rely on data and place our first prototype in a real building, where we expose it to all the things we need it for. Then we look for all the reasons why it failed. We give it many samples in a very short time. For example, a few years ago we launched our Robin robot arm – a package manipulation robot – and we are at 3 billion picks. So the ability to launch into our network, quickly collect data, scale and iterate has allowed us to move quickly.

The challenge itself can be summed up in three simple things: you have to observe the scene, plan your movement and then execute it. Today these are three different parts of our system. Artificial intelligence is going to help us change all that, and will be more results-oriented, like asking to pick up a bottle of water. We’re on the cusp, so that’s why I’m personally excited to be here at the dawn of generative AI and use it to dramatically improve the performance of our robotics.

A: With the technology we’ve deployed here, we’re creating new roles for individuals who can acquire new skills to fill those roles. And these new skills are not something that is too difficult to achieve. You don’t need an engineering degree, Ph.D. or other truly technical skills to support our robotics systems. We have designed the systems so that they are easy to maintain and that we can train them on the job to become a reliability maintenance engineer.

We are working backwards from the idea that we want to use more skilled workers. These opportunities are obviously better paid than the entry-level jobs in our buildings. And working with MIT has helped us understand what matters most to our team as we implement these technologies across our network.

A: Not with adoption. We are integrating it. But these are complex systems and this is the real world, so things go wrong. We had bad weather due to the storms in the southeast. When I look at the data from the robotics systems, I see that the weather outside is bad because it dramatically affects the operation of the ship dock.

When trucks don’t arrive on time or can’t leave, you see bottlenecks in the building in strange ways. Containers are piling up, we have to put them in different places, and then people have to retrieve them. Communication between what our robot system does and what we employees in the building need to do to recover is therefore important. It is a collaboration between automation and humans to tackle real-world problems. It’s not about robotics taking over, but rather about it becoming one system of people and robotics working together to achieve the goal of shipping the product.