Time.news – In the Amazon robotics laboratory on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, the brand new automaton of the company “Sparrow” selects the items to be sent to customers, showing dexterity similar to a human hand. It is the most advanced robot of the e-commerce giant and may soon do the work of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees who sort and ship five billion packages a year.
The development of “Sparrow” and other robots like “Robin” and “Cardinal” are fueling fears that Amazon’s warehouses will one day be run by machines.leading to huge layoffs.
Amazon robotics chief Tye Brady plays down those concerns, which have been voiced by unions. “They are not machines that replace people,” he tells reporters during a tour of the lab, which opened in Westborough in October last year. “They are actually machines and people working together to work together to get a job done.”
Equipped with cameras and cylindrical tubes, Sparrow can successfully detect and select a single item from millions of products of different shapes and sizes. It gently vacuums objects arriving on a conveyor belt and distributes them in the special basket in front of it using its robotic arm.
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Amazon warehouses in Great Britain
Robin and Cardinal can only redirect entire parcels, making Sparrow the first Amazon robot capable of handling single products. “Given the variety of materials we have in our warehouses, Sparrow is a significant achievement,” says Brady.
The creations will free employees from repetitive tasks to focus on “more rewarding and interesting” activities while “improving safety,” insists Brady. Amazon’s goal is to ensure that there is as little time as possible between the time a customer orders an item and the time it arrives at their door.
Also on the automation front, by the end of this year Amazon will begin delivering packages of up to two kg with drones, in less than an hour from the warehouses of Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas.
The company aims to deliver 500 million packages via flying machines by the end of the decadeincluding in major US cities such as Boston, Atlanta and Seattle.
According to Joe Quinlivan, vice president of Amazon Robotics, about 75% of Amazon’s five billion annual orders are handled at some point by a robot. However, studies suggest that switching to robots in e-commerce will not lead to massive job losses in the short to medium term due to the huge growth in demand.
However, a 2019 study by the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center warned that while some technologies can alleviate arduous warehouse tasks, they could also help increase “workload and work rate.”
The researchers added that technological advances could also contribute to “new methods of worker tracking” and cited Amazon’s MissionRacer video game “which pits workers against each other to assemble customer orders faster.”
On its own side, Amazon replies that its innovation has generated more than a million jobs and 700 new job categories, mainly in highly specialized engineering, but also as technicians and operators. “I really think what we do over the next five years will dwarf everything we’ve done over the past decade,” says Quinlivan.