(FINANCIAL POST) – Amazon.com Inc. has developed a robot capable of identifying and handling individual items, a milestone in the e-commerce giant’s efforts to reduce its reliance on the human order pickers who currently play a key role in getting products from warehouse shelves to customers’ doorsteps.
The robotic arm, tipped by a set of retractable suction devices, is called Sparrow. In demonstrations on Thursday, the machine autonomously grabbed items of different sizes and textures from a plastic tote and placed them in other receptacles. Amazon said the bot is capable of handling millions of different products.
WND is now on Trump's Truth Social! Follow us @WNDNews
Automating such tasks may look simple but has stumped Amazon roboticists for years. Machines at the company’s facilities have long lifted pallets, arranged tightly packed shelves and shuttled packages on conveyor belts. But Amazon also employs hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, whose dexterity and intuition currently let them pick and pack items more quickly and more reliably than existing machines.
The post Amazon's new warehouse robot could replace humans appeared first on WND.
