Amazon has unveiled “Sparrow,” a new intelligent robotic system that aims to simplify the fulfillment process by moving individual products before they are packaged.
Unlike the retail giant’s previously deployed robotic arms, which include the likes of Cardinal and Robin, Amazon claims the Sparrow arm can identify about 65% of its product inventory without human assistance.
Sparrow uses computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and manipulate millions of items, simplifying the process and saving human energy, and the company says Amazon employees around the world have picked, stored or packed nearly 5 billion packages — or more than 13 million packages per day.
Why is Amazon betting on bots?
An Amazon spokesperson said in Blog Posts Announcing the news.
“By working with our employees, Sparrow will take on repetitive tasks, enabling our employees to focus their time and energy on other things, while also enhancing safety.”
Sources indicated that the retail giant is in dire need of automated intervention.
Leaked internal search, originally reported by vox (Opens in a new tab)He claimed that Amazon could run out of employees willing to work in its warehouses by 2024 if it did not change its hiring practices.
“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will exhaust the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research states.
Amazon has always bet on robots, and in 2012 it made a major investment to improve productivity in the supply chain by acquiring Kiva, a robotics company whose technology is still in heavy use ten years later.
Robots don’t take human jobs, they also create them if Amazon’s claims are to be believed.
The company estimates that more than 700 new job categories have been created across its operations to date thanks to the deployment of automated technology
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