Agencies
Amazon.com said on Wednesday it was using a robotic system at one of its Houston warehouses to improve inventory management and speed up deliveries, building on its years-long bet that automation will help boost sales and worker safety.
The technology, called "Sequoia”, brings together a series of systems including mobile robots and robotic arms.
Amazon said Sequoia can help identify and store inventory 75% faster, while reducing the time to process orders at a warehouse by as much as 25%.
The e-commerce giant has been investing aggressively in automation for years, using them to package orders and creating technology that enables cashier-less retail stores, among others.
Several other major retailers have also recently laid out plans to invest in robotic systems, with rival Walmart saying earlier this year it expects about 65% of its stores to be serviced by automation by the end of its fiscal year 2026.
Amazon, which has been in the crosshairs of U.S. safety regulators for allegedly hazardous conditions at its warehouses, is also banking on robots to improve worker safety.
The company said it would begin testing a bipedal robot called "Digit” from Agility Robotics, a startup backed by Amazon. Digit, already in testing at Ford, can move, grasp, and handle items in warehouses.
Amazon said the move was about "freeing employees up to better deliver for our customers”.
It said it was testing a new robot called Digit, which has arms and legs and can move, grasp and handle items in a similar fashion to a human.
A union said Amazon had "been treating their workers like robots for years”.
"Amazon’s automation is [a] head-first race to job losses. We’ve already seen hundreds of jobs disappear to it in fulfilment centres,” said Stuart Richards, an organiser at UK trade union GMB.
As the announcement was made, Amazon said its robotics systems had in fact helped create "hundred of thousands of new jobs” within its operations.
"This includes 700 categories of new job types, in skilled roles, which didn’t exist within the company beforehand,” the firm said.
According to the tech giant, it now has more than 750,000 robots working "collaboratively” with its human staff, often being used to take on "highly repetitive tasks”.
Tye Brady, the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, claimed that – although it will render some jobs redundant – the deployment of robots would create new ones.
In a briefing at a media event at an Amazon facility on the outskirts of Seattle, Brady told reporters that he wants to "eliminate all the menial, the mundane and the repetitive” tasks inside Amazon’s business. He denied this would lead to job cuts, however, claiming that it "does not” mean Amazon will require fewer staff.
Insisting that people are "irreplaceable” in the company’s operation, Brady pushed back at the suggestion it could one day have a fully automated warehouse. "There’s not any part of me that thinks that would ever be a reality,” he said. "People are so central to the fulfillment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems.
"We will always need people … I’ve never been around an automated system that works 100% of the time. I don’t think you have as well.”
Digit was developed by Agility Robotics, a startup based in Corvallis, Oregon, and backed by Amazon. The robot, which can walk forwards, backwards and sideways, and can crouch – is 5ft 9in (175cm) tall and weighs 143lb (65kg). It can carry up to 35lb (16kg).
Amazon plans to put Digit to work "in spaces and corners of warehouses in novel ways”, it said in a blogpost. "We believe that there is a big opportunity to scale a mobile manipulator solution, such as Digit, which can work collaboratively with employees.
"Our initial use for this technology will be to help employees with tote recycling, a highly repetitive process of picking up and moving empty totes once inventory has been completely picked out of them.”
Ford, the carmaker, was the first buyer of Digit robots. Agility Robotics got investment from Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund last year.
Separately at Wednesday’s event, Amazon announced it was deploying a robotic system called Sequoia at one of its Houston warehouses in an effort to speed up deliveries. The system is designed to help identify and store inventory 75% more quickly, it said, and reduce the processing time of orders by as much as 25%.
Onstage, Brady said: "Collaborative robotics involves people. How can we have people be the stars, the spotlight, the center of the show, when it comes to the jobs that we have to do?
"When we do our job really, really well, our robotic systems just kind of blend into the background to become ubiquitous. You don’t talk about your dishwasher too much in your kitchen. It’s an amazing robot. It’s such a great robot that I don’t even call it a robot.”