WESTBOROUGH, MASS. — In a brightly lighted warehouse tucked along an industrial road about 45 minutes west of Boston, a yellow-plated, gooseneck-like mechanical arm stretched one recent morning and plucked a plastic jar holding a powdered drink mix out of a yellow box. The device rose up, spun around with a loud whirring sound and gently placed the jar a few feet away into a gray bin.
It twisted again toward the yellow box and soon after grabbed a DVD case, a very different shape from the cylindrical jar, before pivoting quickly again to drop the item into an adjacent bin.
The actions look something like those of an amusement park claw game, except they are executed rapidly and smoothly, just like the countless movements that workers undertake to pick and pack millions of online orders each day in warehouses across the world.
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But the robotic device, known as Sparrow, is outfitted with suction cups and artificial intelligence software rather than the eyes and hands of human workers. It is the latest attempt by
Amazon.
com Inc. to automate more of its warehousing operations by turning some of the most physically challenging and repetitive tasks over to robots.
Warehouse workers pick items up, sort them and put them down millions of times a day. But Amazon is trying to get Sparrow to do something that robots have long struggled with—picking up a variety of objects as easily as humans can, as well as identifying them by characteristics such as color, shape and size.
Sparrow is “a major leap in technology challenge and technology development,” said Joseph Quinlivan, Amazon’s vice president of global robotics and technology, on Nov. 10 at an event displaying the machine.
Amazon has been criticized for the tough requirements it imposes on workers in the name of efficiency. Warehouse workers at Amazon and other companies are at risk of developing repetitive-stress injuries and musculoskeletal disorders.
The company has rolled out safety programs and work schedules designed to cut down on those injuries and has said it sets expectations based on employees’ aggregate performance in a given warehouse to ensure people aren’t pushed beyond what is reasonable.
Amazon’s Sparrow on showcase at an event held on Nov. 10 at the company’s robotics laboratory in Westborough, Mass. The Sparrow is “a major leap in technology challenge and technology development,” said Joseph Quinlivan, Amazon’s vice president of global robotics and technology.
Photo:
M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg News
Sparrow is meant to be the next step in that safety process, the company said. The robot “is going to help really transform our network in those repetitive motion challenges we have,” Mr. Quinlivan said.
If Sparrow can eventually on a large scale handle items as varied as vitamins,
Apple
watchbands and packaged board games, it could carry Amazon’s stalling logistics operations forward during a period of cost-cutting across the company, including within the robotics division.
Sparrow can handle millions of items that represent about 65% of Amazon’s total inventory, the company …….