Amazon warehouses have many robots that are used to pick order items, but a recent report has suggested the droids are struggling to keep up with the capabilities of humans in its warehouses.
Amazon’s robots supplied by its robotics division are good for picking items stored at heights beyond the reach of humans without ladders, but according to an article by The Byte, they struggle to match human abilities for some tasks.
A common situation in a warehouse is when a picker has to find an item hidden under other items. If the robot cannot detect the item with its vision sensors, it cannot pick it up, whereas it is a simple task for a human to quickly find the item. The chief technologist of Amazon Robotics, Tye Brady, admitted that this ability has yet to be developed in robots, but believes that future generations of robots will to capable of this.
Amazon has around 750,000 robots, which is about half of its 1.55 million human workers. It also has automated warehouse systems that boost the speed and accuracy of picking and packing orders.
Many warehouses use robots to perform repetitive tasks, but many in favour of robots say that this is good for human workers as it creates more interesting jobs for humans. Warehouses have a high turnover of staff in the more mundane jobs; robots can potentially make up for staff shortages.
Warehouses without Amazon’s financial resources may not have the budget for expensive robots. In these cases, they can continue to rely on their warehouse equipment supplier to provide manual handling equipment such as picking trolleys that enable human warehouse workers to efficiently pick order items.
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