Amazon will add a slew of recent robotics and artificial intelligence-technologies into its warehouses in an effort to reduce delivery times and speed up inventory operations, the e-commerce behemoth said Wednesday.
The high-tech upgrade — which debuted at a warehouse in Houston this week — will likely be rolled out across the corporate’s 175-plus additional warehouses worldwide come 2024 based on the way it performs through the vacation season, an Amazon spokesperson told The Post.
The robotics system, named Sequoia after the colossal trees native to California’s Sierra Nevada region, will allow Amazon to list items on the market on its website faster, and can have the ability to more easily predict delivery estimates, the corporate’s director of robotic storage technology, David Guerin, told The Wall Street Journal.
Sequoia is predicted to reduce the time it takes to fulfill an order by up to 25%, and might discover and store inventory as much as 75% faster, Guerin said.
It’s unclear whether the brand new system will lead to any layoffs on the warehouses.
Amazon noted the corporate has “rolled out tons of of hundreds of robotics systems while also creating tons of of hundreds of recent jobs.”
Last month, Amazon announced it was hiring 250,000 employees for the vacations, and bumped up hourly wages.
Sequoia “works by having mobile robots transport containerized inventory directly to a gantry, a tall frame with a platform supporting equipment that may either restock totes or send them to an worker to pick inventory that customers have ordered,” Amazon explained.
The system’s integrated robotics system — equipped with small robotic arms and computer vision — then hand off the empty bins to an worker who will pick items for delivery.
Sorting was previously done by humans, who can have had to reach high shelves to pick heavy items.
Nevertheless, robots will now do the heavy lifting — literally — and deliver a sorted container to an actual person at waist level to prevent injury in the ultimate step of the packaging process.
Amazon touted in its release that injury incidents were 15% lower in 2022 than the yr prior despite upping the quantity of robots involved in its operations.
Remaining inventory will likely be consolidated by the Sparrow sporting robot, a gooseneck-like robotic arm that Amazon debuted in its warehouses last yr.
Guerin told The Journal that he expects the system to make up a significant slice of the corporate’s operations in the following three to five years.
“The faster we are able to process inventory, the greater the probability that we’re going to have the ability to deliver after we said we could,” he said.
Also Wednesday, Amazon said it has plans to begin testing Digit, a humanoid-type robot that mimics human behaviors and may be programmed to perform certain tasks.
“Digit can move, grasp, and handle items in spaces and corners of warehouses in novel ways,” Amazon said, noting that the robot may “work collaboratively with employees.”
The brand new tech will see robots helping with a process referred to internally as tote recycling, which Amazon described as “a highly repetitive strategy of picking up and moving empty totes once inventory has been completely picked out of them.”